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Concept
Expanded genetic code
Summary
An expanded genetic code is an artificially modified genetic code in which one or more specific codons have been re-allocated to encode an amino acid that is not among the 22 common naturally-encoded proteinogenic amino acids.
The key prerequisites to expand the genetic code are:
the non-standard amino acid to encode,
an unused codon to adopt,
a tRNA that recognises this codon, and
a tRNA synthetase that recognises only that tRNA and only the non-standard amino acid.
Expanding the genetic code is an area of research of synthetic biology, an applied biological discipline whose goal is to engineer living systems for useful purposes. The genetic code expansion enriches the repertoire of useful tools available to science.
In May 2019, researchers, in a milestone effort, reported the creation of a new synthetic (possibly artificial) form of viable life, a variant of the bacteria Escherichia coli, by reducing the natural number of 64 codons in the bacterial genome to 61 codons (eliminating two out of the six codons coding for serine and one out of three stop codons) - of which 59 used to encode 20 amino acids.
It is noteworthy that the genetic code for all organisms is basically the same, so that all living beings use the same ’genetic language’. In general, the introduction of new functional unnatural amino acids into proteins of living cells breaks the universality of the genetic language, which ideally leads to alternative life forms. Proteins are produced thanks to the translational system molecules, which decode the RNA messages into a string of amino acids. The translation of genetic information contained in messenger RNA (mRNA) into a protein is catalysed by ribosomes. Transfer RNAs (tRNA) are used as keys to decode the mRNA into its encoded polypeptide. The tRNA recognizes a specific three nucleotide codon in the mRNA with a complementary sequence called the anticodon on one of its loops. Each three-nucleotide codon is translated into one of twenty naturally occurring amino acids.
Official source
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