We’ve heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth.

They call their creation “Syn57,” a bioengineered strain of E. coli — yes, the same bad boy that can make you extremely sick if you eat an undercooked hot dog — which uses seven less codons than all life on earth. A codon, put simply, is a three-letter sequence found in DNA and RNA which delivers instructions for amino acids, a fundamental “building block” of life.

For the past billions years or so, all known life on earth has used 64 codons. Scientists cracked the code detailing which codons corresponded to which amino acids — mapping the standard genetic code, in other words — in 1966, revealing only 20 total amino acids.

Intriguingly, they realized, evolution hadn’t resulted in perfect efficiency, since some of the codons were clearly redundant. It raised a tantalizing possibility: was there room to trim some of the fat, engineering a more efficient organism from scratch?

First they just needed a proof of concept. In 2010, a team 24 researchers detailed the steps taken to create the world’s first synthetic bacteria cell. Though it was — and still is — an astonishing feat, taking some 15 years to complete, the faux-cell was still only a faithful recreation of the stuffy ol’ 64 codon version.

Then, in 2019, genetic researchers at Cambridge University were able to chip off at that natural redundancy and rework an E. coli strand down to 61 codons — demonstrating without a doubt that life can function with less than the tried-and-true 64. The incredible feat was heralded at the time as the “most ambitious attempt at a completely synthetic form of life” to date.

And now they’ve gone even further. To make Syn57, the researchers went through the painstaking processing of altering over 101,000 lines of genetic code — first in theory, then in practice.

Unlike the synthetic bacteria from 2010, according to the New York Times, advances in DNA synthesis mean that genetic researchers can now construct genomes from scratch, avoiding some of the redundant codons from the start.

“You can start exploring what life will tolerate,” Akos Nyerges, a synthetic biologist at Harvard told the newspaper. “We can finally test these alternative genetic codes.”

Nyerges was on one of the teams engaged in the race to build Syn57, which was ultimately won by the team at Cambridge.

“We definitely went through these periods where we were like, ‘Well, will this be a dead end, or can we see this through?'” said Medical Research Council researcher Wesley Robertson, one of the authors of the Cambridge study.

The result of their back-breaking experimentation?

“Life still works,” Robertson told the paper.

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