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Neat, but extending amino acids would be even cooler. DNA is mostly "just" a string encoding for information, like binary or hexadecimal. Proteins on the other
by jey 11y ago
Neat, but extending amino acids would be even cooler. DNA is mostly "just" a string encoding for information, like binary or hexadecimal. Proteins on the other hand are the actual machines whose blueprints are written in DNA, and they're built out of amino acids. Extending the set of amino acids could extend the set of basic building blocks available to create biomolecular machines.
Of course, teaching ribosomes to handle them and etc will take a lot of additional work, but identifying promising new amino acids would be a nice and major first step.
- phkahler 11y ago>> Of course, teaching ribosomes to handle them and etc will take a lot of additional work, but identifying promising new amino acids would be a nice and major first step. There are a couple other amino acids in the tree of life. The mapping from base pairs to aminos is not completely static. And then there's Selenocystine (Sec) which is coded in a very unusual way. I've often thought the redundancy in the encoding allows mutations to have no effect, so a protein that is well established and important could have a more stable encoding and new things still in flux could be more prone to evolving (less stable encoding). But I have no real data on this.
- dnautics 11y agoThat's already been done many times over. Out of hundreds executed, There are a handful of interesting ones, benzoylphenylalanine, azidophenylalanine, phenylalanine methyl ketone, and bipyalanine, but the thing is, that nature really has a good selection of amino acids to accomplish just about anything it could do. The reliable chemistries that are compatible with a water solvent are few, which is why so much organic chemistry is done in nonaqueous solvent.