The genetic code of the fruit fly Drosophila has been hacked into, allowing it to make proteins with properties that don’t exist in the natural world. The advance could ultimately lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. The four letters of the genetic code, A, C, T and G, are read in triplets, called codons, by the cell’s protein-making machinery. Each codon gives an instruction for the type of amino acid that gets added next in a protein chain, or tells the machinery to stop.
