By Jacintha Bower via Science Alert Headline Image: © fpm/Getty Images Illustration of a bacteriophage In the world of microbial warfare, sometimes you have to change the very fabric of who you are. Viruses that infect bacteria - fittingly called bacteriophages - and their prey have been at war for eons, each side evolving more devilish tactics to infect or destroy each other. Eventually, some bacteriophages took this arms race to a new level by changing the way they code their DNA. At least, that's what we think happened. Once thought to be an outlier, new research published in three separate papers shows that there's a whole army of bacteriophages with non-standard DNA, which researchers call a Z-genome. "Genomic DNA is composed of four standard nucleotides ... These nucleobases form the genetic alphabet, ATCG, which is conserved across all domains of life," biologists Michael Grome and Farren Isaacs write in a recent Science editorial accompanying the new research on bacteriophage