Living systems provide the most sophisticated materials known. These materials are created from a few dozen building blocks that are driven to self-organize by covalent and non-covalent interactions.

Non-natural amino acids are increasingly used as building blocks in the development of peptide-based drugs as they expand the available chemical space to tailor function, half-life and other key ...

I wonder if the pre-LUCA ribosome itself might have been radically different before we fixed on 20 amino acids? Obviously the protein scaffolding would be different, but also it could afford to be a ...

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could ...