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So... like... what happened, exactly? It sounds astonishing, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Rosemberg and his team managed to add new letters ("letters
by MarsAscendant 8y ago
So... like... what happened, exactly?
It sounds astonishing, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Rosemberg and his team managed to add new letters ("letters") to DNA encoding, and that allows them to make new proteins... how? Did they make new kinds of acid bases for these proteins – the kinds that don't exist in nature? Is that not an even more astonishing achievement?
I'm way out of my depth here, but I'm also intensely curious about anything related to genetic engineering. Could someone explain this to me?
- eggie 8y ago> So... like... what happened, exactly? A group added a new DNA base pair ("X" and "Y") to a strain of E. coli. In genes, codons are triplets of DNA letters that transcription and translation machinery converts into specific amino acids. The mechanisms by which this happens are complex, but well understood. The new DNA letters were used to make new codons that could be translated to particular, novel, amino acids.
- MarsAscendant 8y agoSo, did they effectively invent scalable natural-mechanism synthetic amino acid production? Is it at all as cool and biopunk as I imagine?