posted on Feb, 16 2008 @ 08:46 AM
It is a breakthrough, of course, since it has never been done before. But the usefull prospects of it is quite a bit into the future.
You see, even though we can now incorporate nucleic acids into a DNA chain, it has little use at this point. The cellular machinery has no way of
transcriping the DNA chain, because it doesn't know the nuclec acid. So it would probably just go to a stop, and make a premature and incomplete RNA
chain, and therefore a faulty protein (If one at all).
It could only be used for well, stopping transcription. If the DNA-transcribing enzymes stops with the chain attached, it is a bit usefull, but we
have other techniques for doing that.
The real advantage could come several years into the future, when man has learned to design proteins from the bottom and up. Then we can make enzymes
that can handle these special nucleic acids, and make special DNA strings that can't be transferred to other organisms, making GMO much safer
compared to now.