FLICKR, DUNCAN HULLDuke University researchers have created a new algorithm to determine the least-repetitive DNA sequence that can encode any given protein, according to a paper published last week (January 4) in Nature Materials. The algorithm, which is freely available online, should allow researchers to more easily experiment with biopolymers and other structurally repetitive polypeptides.
“Repetitive proteins can have important structural and functional properties of interest to materials science and biomedicine, and being able to easily study them and build many variants is quite exciting,” Daniel Goodman, a synthetic biologist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
“We’re providing a new tool to empower people to do new and cool polymer science using amino acid building blocks,” said study coauthor Ashutosh Chilkoti, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.
Our cars, homes, and workplaces are filled with polymers—often plastics. “The polymers that have changed the world have largely been synthetic,” Chilkoti said. New biopolymers, encoded genetically, will be biodegradable and nontoxic. And ...
