Researchers report they’ve developed an efficient way to coax bacteria to add structurally unusual amino acids into proteins. So far they’ve succeeded with just four exotic building blocks, but their approach could lead to medicines that persist longer in the body and better catalysts for industry. “It’s a big accomplishment to get these new categories of amino acids into proteins,” says Chang Liu, a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Irvine who was not part of the study, which was published this week in Nature. Read More