On Nov. 9, 2021, Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced the program, named Codetta, can read the genome sequence of any organism, and then spit out its genetic code: the biological key that translates genetic information into instructions for building proteins.

In the largest screen to date for such alternative genetic codes, the program scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea and identified five never-before-seen codes. The study was published in in the journal, eLife.