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Researchers have generated E. coli with a fully synthetic genome in which three codons have been replaced with their synonyms, reports a paper published yesterday (May 15) in Nature. The genome-recoded bacteria are a bit bigger and are slower growing than their wild-type counterparts. But, they are alive.
“It was completely unclear whether it was possible to make a genome this large and whether it was possible to change it so much,” Jason Chin, a molecular biologist at the UK’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the scientist who led the project, tells The Guardian.
A synthetic genome is one that scientists have created chemically, then inserted into cells. In 2010, Craig Venter and colleagues created the first organism with a fully synthetic genome by piecing together synthesized pieces of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides’s 1 million–base-pair-long genome.
A recoded genome is one in which ...
