Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first
things you’ll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making
proteins, tiny machines that do much of the work in our body’s cells. Results
from a study published on Jan. 2 in Science defy textbook science, showing for
the first time that the building blocks of a protein, called amino acids, can
be assembled without blueprints – DNA and an intermediate template called
messenger RNA (mRNA). A team of researchers has observed a case in which
another protein specifies which amino acids are added.