On Nov. 9, 2021, Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced a program, named Codetta, that 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.

The program 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. Across most of the tree of life, this code is universal. But scientists have found a handful of exceptions – in some organisms, genetic info codes for instructions different from those in other life-forms.

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.