First step to ‘designer life’: Biologists breed bacteria with lab-made DNA, adding two extra, artificial lettersBiohackers will find this article to be of special interest. This is kind of a big deal.
Scientists led by the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have added two extra, artificial letters to the ancient alphabet of A, C, G and T. And the E. coli living with this unusual six-letter, three-base-pair alphabet are, by the account published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, capable of surviving tough laboratory conditions.
The biologists added two new letters to the four-letter DNA alphabet within E. coli bacteria. The scientists called the novel base units dNaM and d5SICS (a newer, improved version of the bases were named dNaM and dTPT3). You can think of these unnatural nucleobases as X and Y. Years own the line, microbes with increased genetic information could present exciting and lucrative scientific possibilities: bacteria capable of churning out therapeutic human proteins, or altered bugs that hoover up environmental
spills.
LINK:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/world/first+step+98designer+life+biologists+breed+bacteria+with/12770628/story.html