Semi synthetic organisms can produce unnatural proteins

In a paper published on November 29 in the British journal Nature, Scripps Research Institute in the United States published the latest progress in synthetic biology They have developed a semi synthetic organism that can store and retrieve artificial genetic information, and it can generate unnatural modified proteins with almost no gap between the efficiency and the natural This achievement will become a platform for people to create new proteins and new functions, but the rapid development of synthetic biology has caused concern The genetic code consists of four nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, which form the "steps" of DNA double helix in pairs In 2014, Scripps Institute scientist Floyd lomsberg and his colleagues developed a semi synthetic strain of E.coli In addition to four natural nucleotides, it also contains an extended genetic code, including two non natural nucleotides The bacteria can maintain and regenerate the modified genetic code, but it was not clear whether the unnatural nucleotide could encode proteins like normal DNA Now, the results of lomsberg's team show that the bacteria can not only store and retrieve genetic information, but also transcribe unnatural nucleotides to synthesize proteins containing unnatural amino acids, with no significant difference in efficiency compared with the natural state The team believes that the bacteria can be used as a platform to create new proteins and new functions Researchers say that creating organisms to produce unnatural modified proteins has long been a goal of synthetic biology Now this semi synthetic organism has been able to produce proteins containing unnatural amino acids On the one hand, the results pave the way for scientists to use unnatural amino acids to design new proteins, on the other hand, they also point out the direction for the creation of new therapies, plastics and other materials For a long time, quite a number of people have expressed their concerns about the rapid development of synthetic biology They believe that this "new type of biology" may escape from the laboratory in the future, which will cause unexpected consequences in both ethical perspective and real society.