kayshapero

It started when I looked up DNA base pairs since for some reason one of the names had slipped my memory (for the record, Adenine - Thymine, Cytosine - Guanine [or Uracil with some RNA]) and found this Wikipedia article.  Now look down the page to "Unnatural Base Pair" to see what got my attention...  Yeppers, if you work at it you can find other bases that you can fit into the double helix.  In fact if you'll look near the end of that section, someone actually inserted some into a strain of E Coli and lo and behold, they have remained in the organism's genome for a number of generations.  Don't CODE for anything, but still impressive.  An article in Popular Mechanics of all things: New Organisms With Synthetic DNA Could Lead to Entirely New Life Forms

Down in the further reading section, you find among other references, these two which cost $$$ to read, but all you really need to see are the abstracts which are free.  Yeppers, if this works out you get nano power cables for nano constructions....


Clever, Guido H.; Shionoya, Mitsuhiko (2012). "Chapter 10. Alternative DNA Base-Pairing through Metal Coordination". Interplay between Metal Ions and Nucleic Acids. pp. 269–294.

Megger, Dominik A.; Megger, Nicole; Mueller, Jens (2012). "Chapter 11. Metal-Mediated Base Pairs in Nucleic Acids with Purine and Pyrimidine-Derived Neucleosides". Interplay between Metal Ions and Nucleic Acids. pp. 295–317.