New word in life's lexiconResearchers find 22nd amino acid in a microbe.24 May 2002JOHN WHITFIELDThere's a new word to life's vocabulary. DNA letters can be rearranged to spell out a 22nd amino acid, researchers have discovered. DNA: the letters of life have more permutations than we thought. © Getty Images The scientists who cracked life's genetic code in the 1950s said that it writes a mere 20 'words' - the amino acids from which the myriad proteins in all life are built. But in 1986 another amino acid was discovered in bacteria. "We thought the 21st was an aberration,...