It’s a dogma taught in every introductory biology class: Proteins are composed of combinations of 20 different amino acids, arranged into diverse sequences like words. But researchers trying to engineer biologic molecules with new functions have long felt limited by those 20 basic building blocks and strived to develop ways of putting new building blocks — called non-canonical amino acids — into their proteins. Now, scientists have designed a new paradigm for easily adding non-canonical amino acids to proteins.
