Not sure I understand the benefit, it's denser, on the other hand from what I understand DNA generally does have much in the way of size constraints. If I remember large swathes of DNA is inactive and there isn't selective pressure to clean up this wasted space. Coupled with the fact that it is apparently more error prone and seems to show why evolution didn't go down this path.
Probabably will be very useful for synthetic purposes where there isn't too much concern about fidelity after 10 million years of copying.
> Not sure I understand the benefit, it's denser, on the other hand from what I understand DNA generally does have much in the way of size constraints.
I'm a layman, but they could use the new base pairs to code for unusual amino acids allowing for proteins with novel chemistry.
Also, I think DNA is pretty much only used to encode information, but RNA has important chemical roles (e.g. ribozymes), and the new base pairs open up similar possibilities with that.
Probabably will be very useful for synthetic purposes where there isn't too much concern about fidelity after 10 million years of copying.