Cloning, move over.

The powerful and potentially dark force that would give you a "mini-me" may soon be knocked off genetic engineering's center stage by an emerging laboratory effort to create life that is decidedly not as we know it.

In two separate research efforts, scientists have altered the very nature of nature by creating cells that break a cardinal rule of biology, incorporating an entirely new basic building block into their cellular structures. It is a first step on a path of neogenesis -- the creation of alternate life forms.

In several interviews, experts said the work will help scientists study our own terrestrial evolution and also investigate how life might have developed in unknown ways on other worlds.

Here's how it is happening:

Scientists said that creating a laboratory ET is a ways off, assuming humanity even agrees to go there.

But the novel cells are already on the verge of alternative life, said a scientist who worked on one of the studies, Paul Schimmel of the Scripps Research Institute in California.

"It is a first step to creating organisms that use building blocks other than the ones we are all familiar with," Schimmel told SPACE.com. "In that sense, you could consider it an alternative life form."

Schimmel said the bacteria survive and reproduce, even though their proteins are chugging along with an alien amino acid.

Astrobiologists, chemists and other scientists say this ability to tinker with biology will provide new ways to investigate how life began on Earth and how it evolved. It might also help determine whether extraterrestrial life could follow different rules of biology.

Schimmel said the result raises the possibility that unusual amino acids in space could provide the building blocks of unimagined living systems, and that "a more primitive code could be used to get life started."

David W. Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz, said the results "confirm that the life process is not a perfect machine, but instead a molecular system that will use whatever it can find as long as it works."

This apparent flexibility in how modern bacteria structure themselves "can be explored to determine the limits of life in adapting to novel structures, as must have also occurred on the early Earth at the time that life began," Deamer said.

And if life forms are ever found on Mars or elsewhere, scientists would now be better equipped to determine whether a true alien has been found or whether we've just met back up with ancient ancestors that somehow traveled from one celestial body to another.

"Suppose we get to Mars or Europa and find living microorganisms," Deamer said. "How will we know whether they are true ET or simply delivered there from the Earth? Or vice versa?

"If they have a different genetic code and use different amino acids...we might conclude that life began independently. But if we can force terrestrial bacteria to evolve toward such a different set of [building blocks] and codes, it will suggest that the life process has much more flexibility than we think, so that a true ET could solve the same basic puzzle when it originated, but use different pieces."