Hachimoji DNA
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.2 nm. About 13,000, stacked, would span a human hair. Its twelve synthetic letters are shaded dark.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Hachimoji: Japanese for “eight letters.” G, A, C, T, P, B, Z, S.
- Height
- 6.1 nm, this piece: 16 rungs.
- Weight
- 16 zeptograms, this piece.
- Marks
- The dark band: six synthetic pairs in a row. The helix doesn’t mind.
- Build
- Plain B-form, 10.2–10.4 pairs a turn. Passes for ordinary DNA.
- Capacity
- Three bits a letter. Yours manage two.
- Habits
- Copied into eight-letter RNA that folds up and makes a dye glow green.
- Suspected
- Of showing how life elsewhere might spell. Its makers’ words: “life throughout the cosmos.”
- Last seen
- Being read by plain E. coli RNA polymerase, under cryo-EM, in a lab in San Diego.
different 16-letter strands it can spell. Plain DNA: 4.3 billion.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Hachimoji DNA, No. 140 of the exotic forty. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
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