Although the myriad proteins found in all life are largely built from a set of 20 amino acids, many other amino acids exist in nature, and it remains a curiosity as to why some were ultimately ...

Life on Earth is complex and varied, but every living organism on the planet builds its proteins from the same set of 20 amino acids. All proteins in a human body, for example, are made up of some ...

Nearly seven years ago, MIT scientists mapped the molecular structure of proteins in spider silk threads onto musical theory to produce the "sound" of silk in hopes of establishing a radical new way ...

The 20 amino acids that make up the building blocks of a protein contain chemical bonds that vibrate at different frequencies. Markus Buehler, a materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts ...

There are 20 canonical amino acids that are encoded by the genetic code of nearly all known organisms - there are only very few exceptions. In order to add novel building blocks to this existing ...

Often called the universal language, music may well represent life itself. Having studied a wide range of biomaterials, from amino-acids and viruses to spider-silk, Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo ...

Synthetic bacteria with expanded genetic codes can evolve proteins in the laboratory with enhanced properties using mechanisms that might not be possible with nature's 20 amino acid building blocks.