A pond creature whose genes broke the rules of life

A single-celled creature from a pond in Oxford has been found with a genetic code that breaks the rules of life. In almost all known species, three DNA signals called stop codons all tell the cell where a gene ends. But in this ciliate, only one stop codon still works. The other two have been reassigned to build different amino acids instead. Scientists were shocked because they thought these two codons always changed together. This is the first known case where they have split. The discovery was made by researchers at the Earlham Institute and published in PLOS Genetics.

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