By Garrick Bercero

An old Discovery News article has recently been making its rounds on Facebook, which was claiming that “new nucleotides” were identified in human DNA. Users were quick to rant and rave about how game-changing this piece of news is. I read claims about how they’d need to retake biology courses now and how this could have implications on artificial life.

DNA is composed of four canonical bases. Canonical, because they are the classic bases in Watson and Crick’s double helix. That is, four chemical letters that compose genes—adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). These are the A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s you see in biology textbooks. What users took the news to be was that there were new letters to add to these. To be fair to those misled, the title was technically accurate (New Nucleotides Identified in Human DNAfrom Discovery News on July 27, 2011). There are two new nucleotides previously unknown. However, contrary to the subsequent speculations of those I read, the discovery doesn’t demolish or revolutionize anything that we’ve already known about what genes are. A’s will still always pair with T’s and G’s will always pair with C’s. There are no secret letters strewn throughout the genome (at least, for life here on Earth).

Read the full article on the Filipino Freethinkers website.