DNA so dangerous it does not exist

New Scientist reports on research into dangerous DNA The theory is that some DNA sequences may be lethal. Hampikian’s team is deliberately searching for the shortest absent sequences in order to minimise the possibility that absent sequences are missing simply due to chance. So far they have found 86 sequences of 11 nucleotides long that have never been reported in humans.

They have also identified more than 60,000 primes of 15 nucleotides in length and 746 protein “peptoprime” strings of five amino acids that have never been reported in any species.