Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-3213993-20150831060944

In most cases, all organisms use 64 codons (triplets encoding for amino acids) in their genetic code, encoding for 20 amino acids. However, the field of synthetic biology has the potential to create organisms that use synthetic or semi-synthetic amino acids in their genetic code, which could be used to create new proteins with novel functions. This could be useful for various industries.

Expanded genetic code could also potentially be used for biocontainment of genetically modified and synthetic organisms. One example of this was achieved early this year in E. coli (not exactly a dinosaur). By replacing all instances of a stop codon in the bacteria's genome, they were able to engineer some of the proteins in the bacteria to require synthetic amino acids to function. Unless they find a source of these amino acids, the bacteria cannot survive outside the lab. Link

Other ways of expanding the genetic code include engineering amino acids that are encoded by four bases instead of three, or amino acids encoded by unnatural base pairs, as was done in E. coli last year.

This would be much harder to engineer into a dinosaur facismile, however, as bird/theropod genomes are usually around a billion base pairs long, while E. coli has a much smaller and simpler genome. Unlike bacteria, animals also have multiple chromosomes. 