E. coliWIKIMEDIA COMMONS
One goal of synthetic biology is to design organisms that generate biomedically-, agriculturally-, or industrially-useful proteins, often incorporating novel amino acids into their sequences—a process that has thus far proven slow and difficult.
Now, researchers have demonstrated a first step toward a rapid, cheap, and automated way to allow the addition of a new amino acid to the cellular alphabet, successfully replacing a three-nucleotide stop codon throughout the E. coli genome, according to a study published today (July 14) in Science.
The new technique is “pretty impressive because it changes the types of things we can do with genomes,” said Adam Arkin, the director of the Synthetic Biology Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. The findings are ...
