Factory ZĪll three research groups, using a variety of genomic techniques, identified a part of the pathway that leads to the Z-genome in bacteriophages. Now, two research groups in France and one in China have discovered another piece of the puzzle: how this Z-nucleotide ends up in the genomes of bacteriophages - viruses that invade bacteria and use its machinery to replicate. In the late 1980s, researchers found that this Z nucleotide actually gave the virus some advantages: it was more stable at higher temperatures, it helped one strand of DNA bind more accurately to the second strand of DNA after replication (DNA is double-stranded), and Z-DNA could resist certain proteins present in bacteria that would normally destroy viral DNA. In other words, a genetic alphabet that typically consists of ATCG in most organisms on our planet was ZTCG in these viruses.įor decades, this was a head-scratching discovery - as weird as spelling apples “zpples” - and little was known about how this one-letter substitution may have impacted the virus. In 1977, a group of scientists in Russia first discovered that a cyanophage, or a virus that invades a group of bacteria known as cyanobacteria, had substituted all of its As for the chemical 2-aminoadenine (Z).
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