Bacterial cells produced a modified version green fluorescence protein (GFP) using “development-type” genetic encoding.
Over the past several billion years, there are only a few words for the life based codes. However, researchers now have broken the convention and added other letters!
Chemist Floyd Romesberg and coworkers added two exogenous bases or letters in DNA. The cells utilize this information to synthesize non-natural amino acid-mixed GFP. Nature encoded genetic information of the organisms only have four bases: A, T, C and G, which may synthesize 20 different amino acids from different combinations of the bases. New findings showed that non-natural bases in cells may also be used to synthesize protein. To work normally in cells, these exogenous bases should not affect the replication and transcription of regular bases. In 2014, Romesberg lab reported that the DNA of E. Coli contained a non-natural base pair, dNaM and d5SICS. However, they had limitation in separating it and the separation would eventually cause the loss of the DNA.
It has been shown in a recent report that they finally created monitor cells that are compatible to exogenous DNA which transcribes and expresses GFP. These new amino acids don’t alter the function of GFP but contain creative information.
