In the past week, there have been some exciting bits of news from the world of synthetic biology.
First, two publications in the journal Science about "Genetically Recoded Organisms." Both papers featured the same first author, Marc Lajoie, from Harvard. The articles describe the generation of GROs and their potential applications. In one paper, all UAG stop codons in E. coli were replaced with UAA stop codons. In order to assign a new function for the UAG codon, they deleted the gene encoding release factor 1, which is responsible for recognizing UAG as a stop signal. They found that their new strain of E. coli replicated more slowly than its unmodified counterparts, and boasted increased resistance to T7 bacteriophage. The other paper describes the process for replacing sense codons which is exponentially more complex.
A major advantage that GROs would have over genitically modified organisms (GMOs) is that GROs will be genetically isolated. This means that they will not be able to reproduce with non-GROs. Organisms can also be recoded for viral resistance and incorporation of nonstandard amino acids will expand the toolkit for engineering proteins.
