Diagnostic tests for infectious diseases often involve identifying “alien” life – in the form of viral DNA – within a patient. Detecting life on Mars may also rely on DNA detection strategies but, unlike Earth-borne viruses, this alien DNA may look quite a bit different to what we are used to.

To help understand how DNA may have evolved on other planets, UF’s Dr. Steven Benner, director of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) and Firebird Biomolecular Sciences, and his partners went into the laboratory and synthesized DNA-like molecular systems with more than four nucleotides. FfAME is a client company of UF Innovate | Accelerate. This research was funded in part by NASA’s Astrobiology Program.

The resulting synthetic or “alien” DNA can encode proteins, replicate and even evolve under laboratory-controlled conditions. This controlled evolution can be used to develop synthetic DNA molecules that bind to targets important to diseases, such as COVID-19 viruses or cancer cells.