Whenever students approach geneticist Jef Boeke claiming that they’ve made a cool new discovery, his first reaction is always, “Show me the plates.” Boeke is the founding director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health, and most of the work in his lab focuses on microorganisms. Looking directly at his students’ cells under the microscope helps him pick out details that could lead to interesting discoveries, so when NYU Grossman School of Medicine PhD student Julie Trolle sent him pictures of her genetically engineered Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells in 2017, he knew that he needed to see them for himself. What he saw was the resurrection of an amino acid synthesizing pathway that was lost in animals more than 500 million years ago.
In total, 20 amino acids make up the thousands of different proteins in all life forms. But animals can only make 11 of ...
