{"id":29076,"date":"2016-08-18T15:32:50","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T22:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/modifying-a-living-genome-with-genetic-equivalent-of-search-and-replace"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:23:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:23:28","slug":"modifying-a-living-genome-with-genetic-equivalent-of-search-and-replace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/modifying-a-living-genome-with-genetic-equivalent-of-search-and-replace","title":{"rendered":"Modifying a living genome with genetic equivalent of \u2018search and replace\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Researchers including George Church have made further progress on the path to fully rewriting the genome of living bacteria. Such a recoded organism, once available, could feature functionality not seen in nature. It could also make the bacteria cultivated in pharmaceutical and other industries immune to viruses, saving billions of dollars of losses due to viral contamination. Finally, the altered genetic information in such an organism wouldn\u2019t be able to contaminate natural cells because of the code\u2019s limitations outside the lab, researchers say, so its creation could stop laboratory engineered organisms from genetically contaminating wildlife. In the DNA of living organisms, the same amino acid can be encoded by multiple codons \u2014 DNA \u201cwords\u201d of three nucleotide letters. Here, building on previous work that demonstrated it was possible to use the genetic equivalent of \u201csearch and replace\u201d in Escherichia coli<\/i><\/em> to substitute a single codon with an alternative, Nili Ostrov, Church and colleagues explored the feasibility of replacing multiple codons, genome-wide. The researchers attempted to reduce the number of codons in the E. coli<\/em> code from 64 to 57 by exploring how to eradicate more than 60,000 instances of seven different codons. They systematically replaced all 62,214 instances of these seven codons with alternatives. In the recoded E.coli segments that the researchers assembled and tested, 63% of all instances of the seven codons were replaced, the researchers say, and most of the genes impacted by underlying amino acid changes were expressed normally. Though they did not achieve a fully operational 57-codon E. coli<\/em>, \u201ca functionally altered genome of this scale has not yet been explored,\u201d the authors write. Their results provide critical insights into the next step in the genome rewriting arena \u2014 creating a fully recoded organism.<\/p>\n

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Researchers including George Church have made further progress on the path to fully rewriting the genome of living bacteria. Such a recoded organism, once available, could feature functionality not seen in nature. It could also make the bacteria cultivated in pharmaceutical and other industries immune to viruses, saving billions of dollars of losses due to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29076"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66528,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29076\/revisions\/66528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}