If you paid attention to your Leaving Cert biology you’ll remember that there are 4 letters that make up DNA’s alphabet, G,C,A and T

Except that’s not actually the case any more. But it’s not because your text book was wrong or that we’ve renamed our fundamental building blocks.

Scientists have actually created new synthetic letters to help spell out the story of life.

But why? And what might those new letters allow us to do?

Floyd Romesberg, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Head of the Romesberg Lab at The Scripps Research Institute joined Jonathan to discuss.