DNA base-pair evolution in progress.

[mvgulik]

[Regnurr]

That's pretty cool.

So we already had a kinda evolution of DNA base pairs before when one of them became "a bit defunct" and got replaced.

Adenosine (A), Guanine (G), Thymine (T), and Cytosine (C).

But what happened to Uracil (U)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uracil#In_DNA

It's because Cytosine deaminates into Uracil, and that caused DNA using Uracil to become more unstable as compared to Thymine, which serves the same purpose essentially. So, over time this stability resulted in Thymine gradually replacing Uracil. So even the very structure of DNA itself is prone to gradual improvements and evolutionary selection. Seeing mRNA in viruses evolve the same way is cool.

This isn't news though, viruses are always evolving, and they evolve very fast because they are so numerous. The more kids you have the more dice you roll, one of them is gonna roll a good outcome, so just have more kids. Viruses have a ridiculous amount of 'kids' so it's normal to see rapid evolution, it's also one of the difficulties of evolving against viruses. We evolve relatively slowly, viruses don't.

[dafels]

bruh what