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> Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth. They call their creation „**Syn57**,“ a bioengineered strain of E. coli, which uses seven less codons than all life on earth.

> For the past billions years or so, all known life on earth has used 64 codons. Scientists cracked the code detailing which codons corresponded to which amino acids, mapping the standard genetic code, in other words, in 1966, revealing only 20 total amino acids. Intriguingly, they realized, evolution **hadn’t resulted in perfect efficiency, since some of the codons were clearly redundant**. It raised a tantalizing possibility: was there room to trim some of the fat, engineering a more efficient organism from scratch?

> First they just needed a proof of concept. In 2010, a team 24 researchers detailed the steps taken to create the **world’s first synthetic bacteria cell**. Then, in 2019, genetic researchers at Cambridge University were able to chip off at that natural redundancy and rework an E. coli strand down to 61 codons, demonstrating without a doubt that life **can function with less than the tried-and-true 64.**

> And now they’ve gone even further. To make Syn57, the researchers went through the painstaking processing of altering over 101,000 lines of genetic code, first in theory, then in practice. Unlike the synthetic bacteria from 2010, advances in DNA synthesis mean that genetic researchers **can now construct genomes from scratch**, avoiding some of the redundant codons from the start.

It’s like some of these f’ing scientists ever watch science fiction. They’re going to be the end of us all.

Weird article. Codons aren’t, like, a resource that they’re using less of. They’re an arbitrary designation for an assortment of nucleotides. This is like saying you can make a sentence more efficient by not using any words with silent ‚e’s. It’s a neat party trick, but it’s not particularly useful.

They didn’t ‚create‘ anything. They modified an existing bacteria.