Harvard University’s George Church and colleagues have designed a recoded E. coli genome, which they’ve partially synthesized in the lab. The genome contains just 57 codons instead of the normal 64. The team’s results were published in Science this week (August 18).
“We created something that really pushes the limit of genomes,” study coauthor Nili Ostrov of Harvard told The Scientist. Church added: “It’s arguably the largest and most radical genome engineering project.”
“It is a bit surprising to see how plastic the genome could be,” University of Edinburgh synthetic biologist Patrick Cai, who was not involved with the work, wrote in an email. “It is also very exciting to see [that] technologies such as computational design, de novo synthesis and assembly, as well as a range of phenotyping assays are now mature to support genome refactoring at this scale.”
Members of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) and scientists who ...
