These vaccines insert a piece of ephemeral genetic material into the body’s cells, which then read its code and churn out a specific protein – in this case, telltale “spikes” that stud the outside of the coronavirus – priming the immune system to fight future invaders.Kaseniit and his advisor, assistant professor of chemical engineering Xiaojing Gao, may have found a way to make this possible.“That kind of accuracy just wasn’t previously possible.” The protein produced could be an antigen – a foreign substance that elicits an immune response – like in the case of vaccines, an enzyme that restores function to a broken cell, a fluorescent protein that can be used to track specific cells in a research study, or a protein that triggers cell death to remove pathogenic or otherwise unwanted cells, among other possibilities.The process takes place thanks to an existing set of enzymes called ADAR (Adenosine Deaminases Acting on RNA) – a byproduct of an ongoing viral arms race that has raged within in the human body for millennia, Gao says.As viruses have attacked us over millennia, burrowing into our cells and toying with our genetic machinery, some of their genes have been absorbed and incorporated into our DNA."