Reinforced magic, upon stilts
Mar. 24th, 2005 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackIf I hear at Eastercon anything as purely sense-of-wonder-inducing as the collection of articles below, I'll be amazed.
There's a research group - relevant names are Floyd Romesberg and Peter Schultz - at the Scripps Research Institute who are modifying the absolutely fundamental genetic cycle. They've managed, in separate experiments, to introduce an extra mostly-correctly-replicated nucleoside into the DNA language ([1-deoxyribose-3-fluoro]benzene, bracketting incorrectly in the hope of explaining where the substitutents are; it's not completely unlike deoxycytosine, and here is a nice reference for how the bases are stuck to the sugars on DNA), and to introduce an extra amino acid, with a *four*-letter codon to code for it, into the protein synthesis process.
This is more fundamental than inserting an extra letter into the English alphabet, because languages aren't active in the way that DNA is: the analogy would have to be Hermione discovering the new possibilities of magic words containing sounds that can't be represented in the international phonetic alphabet; it's rather more like making some bytes inside a working computer nine bits long.
At the moment, the extra amino-acid works in vivo, and the extra nucleotide in vitro. I suspect they'll be made to work together in some sufficiently exotic bacteria within a decade, shortly after which three people from the group will get a free trip to Stockholm.
The techniques used are as exotic as the goal; at current state of the chemical art, you can't design synthetase enzymes, polymerases or transfer RNAs, so you have to set up a bacterium and an environment such that there's a strong selection pressure for things with the right property to evolve.
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20020909/print-romesberg.html describes Romesberg's work with a section about the extra nucleotide; the interestingly-titled Efforts Toward the Expansion of the Genetic Alphabet has an indication of what they're doing.
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20040517/onpress.html is the extra-codon press release
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0401517101v1 is the extra-codon paper
Many thanks to Derek Lowe for pointing me at the extended-codons work, and explaining patiently what 3FB means. I'm not quite sure why 3FB hit the scientific press now, the extra-nucleotide work has been going on for at least five years now.
There's a research group - relevant names are Floyd Romesberg and Peter Schultz - at the Scripps Research Institute who are modifying the absolutely fundamental genetic cycle. They've managed, in separate experiments, to introduce an extra mostly-correctly-replicated nucleoside into the DNA language ([1-deoxyribose-3-fluoro]benzene, bracketting incorrectly in the hope of explaining where the substitutents are; it's not completely unlike deoxycytosine, and here is a nice reference for how the bases are stuck to the sugars on DNA), and to introduce an extra amino acid, with a *four*-letter codon to code for it, into the protein synthesis process.
This is more fundamental than inserting an extra letter into the English alphabet, because languages aren't active in the way that DNA is: the analogy would have to be Hermione discovering the new possibilities of magic words containing sounds that can't be represented in the international phonetic alphabet; it's rather more like making some bytes inside a working computer nine bits long.
At the moment, the extra amino-acid works in vivo, and the extra nucleotide in vitro. I suspect they'll be made to work together in some sufficiently exotic bacteria within a decade, shortly after which three people from the group will get a free trip to Stockholm.
The techniques used are as exotic as the goal; at current state of the chemical art, you can't design synthetase enzymes, polymerases or transfer RNAs, so you have to set up a bacterium and an environment such that there's a strong selection pressure for things with the right property to evolve.
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20020909/print-romesberg.html describes Romesberg's work with a section about the extra nucleotide; the interestingly-titled Efforts Toward the Expansion of the Genetic Alphabet has an indication of what they're doing.
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20040517/onpress.html is the extra-codon press release
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0401517101v1 is the extra-codon paper
Many thanks to Derek Lowe for pointing me at the extended-codons work, and explaining patiently what 3FB means. I'm not quite sure why 3FB hit the scientific press now, the extra-nucleotide work has been going on for at least five years now.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 04:26 pm (UTC)There's a Greg Egan short story about replacing the base pairs in DNA with other ones. Admittedly, it's more impressive hearing about it happenning in the flesh, as it were.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 04:42 pm (UTC)Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/5696/625 (if you have full text access via an institutional subscription).
no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 05:06 pm (UTC)A side note. The is mention of developing perfluoro bases, which prefer to form their own phase. If a functional form of DNA and supporting enzymes and tRNA, the resulting bacteria would be very interesting. It might even be immune to virus attacks, as the virus would still be coding the standard DNA and couldn't deal with the new form.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 11:08 pm (UTC)Looks extremely cool though. Can't wait until 2014: creationists will suddenly declare that the Bible proves the whole idea is in fact only 3 1/2 hours old.