Even after they die, these bacteria keep building DNA — and scientists can steer what they make

It sounds like a horror story, but it happened in a lab in Aarhus, Denmark. Researchers starved two kinds of bacteria — Shewanella oneidensis and Bacillus subtilis — and found that after death the microbes kept producing DNA, driven by a dormant virus-like element waking inside them. More remarkable still, Gabriel Antonio Minero and colleagues at Aarhus University worked out how to control which DNA gets produced and give it chosen chemical properties. Published in Angewandte Chemie, the discovery is early and raises more questions than it answers — but a controllable biological factory that runs without living cells could one day help make new biological materials.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation