Double helix showing coplanar alignment of standard base pairs. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MUSHTI
Researchers investigating expanding the DNA “alphabet”—developing artificial bases that can potentially encode more information than the standard A, T, C, and G—have found that DNA polymerase is more accommodating to unusual base pair conformations than previously thought, in new research published this week (June 3) in Nature Chemical Biology. While grabbing the template and replicating DNA strands, the polymerase is able to force the base pairs to adopt a standard geometry, even if they don’t align this way in a normal double helix, explaining how polymerase can incorporate these unnatural bases into DNA sequences.
“This paper makes a very important contribution to synthetic biology,” said Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and the Westheimer Institute, who also works on unnatural ...
