The landmark advance builds on a 2013 study by the team, published in Science, which described the construction of the first GRO. In that study, the researchers demonstrated new solutions for safeguarding genetically engineered organisms and for producing new classes of synthetic proteins and biomaterials with “unnatural,” or human-created, chemistries.

Ochre is a major step toward creating a non-redundant genetic code in E. coli, specifically, which is ideally suited to produce synthetic proteins containing multiple, different synthetic amino acids.