“Our approach provides new evidence of a limited but unequivocal plasticity of the genetic code whose secrets still lie hidden in the majority of unsequenced organisms.”

Published ahead online March 16, 2016 in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Ed., researchers from the DOE Joint Genome Institute and Yale University have discovered that microorganisms recognize more than one codon for the rare, genetically encoded amino acid selenocysteine. The finding adds credence to recent studies indicating that an organism’s genetic vocabulary is not as constrained as had been long held. Read more about this study on the DOE JGI website.