Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish “g” from “q.” What details did you miss? Geneticistsfaced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a “sixth nucleotide” in the DNA alphabet. Two modifications of cytosine, one of the four bases thatmake up DNA, look almost the same but mean different things. But scientists lacked a way of reading DNA, letter by letter, and detecting precisely where these modifications are found in particular tissues or cell types. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Chicago , the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research , the University of California, San Diego and Emory University has developed and tested a technique to accomplish this task. The results are published May 17 in the online edition of the journal Cell .
Full story: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/05/17/new-technique-reveals-unseen-information-dna-code