Artist’s impression of conjoined ribosome subunitsERIK CARLSONIn every kingdom of life, ribosomes—the protein-synthesizing machines of cells—are comprised of two separate subunits. That is the way it has been for billions of years, but now, scientists have stitched the subunits together. In so doing, they have opened the doors to both new discoveries on the biology of these machines and possibilities for synthetic biology applications. The results are published today (July 29) in Nature.
“It’s a really clever paper and there’s a huge body of work that underlies it,” said molecular biologist Harry Noller of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work.
“It’s very exciting,” added Yale University’s Farren Isaacs who also did not participate in the study. “It’s a key advance in understanding ribosome [function] and also in establishing a path to fundamentally alter the catalytic center of the ribosome . . . which will really allow you to start introducing new types of chemistries [and] producing entirely new classes of synthetic polymers.”
Molecular biologists often tinker with the machinery of cells to figure out how they work. But for ancient machines like the ribosome, such tinkering isn’t straightforward, said Alexander Mankin ...
