Daily Archives: October 18, 2013

#39;smORFs #39;: Functional Little Genome Gems Confront Evolution
http://www.icr.org/article/7730/ Based on their 3-D shape, the researchers claimed that the human smORF proteins evolved from fly smORFs over a span of 550 m...

By: Dave Flang

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'smORFs': Functional Little Genome Gems Confront Evolution - Video

Breast Cancer Genome Guided Therapy Study (BEAUTY)
Breast Cancer Genome Guided Therapy Study (BEAUTY), Dr. Lyndsay Harris, Director of the UH Breast Cancer Program, discusses research of genome sequencing to ...

By: Charlie Dara

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Breast Cancer Genome Guided Therapy Study (BEAUTY) - Video

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17-Oct-2013

Contact: Bill Hathaway william.hathaway@yale.edu 203-432-1322 Yale University

Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium's ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism's genetic code.

"This is the first time the genetic code has been fundamentally changed," said Farren Isaacs, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale and co-senior author of the research published Oct. 18 in the journal Science. "Creating an organism with a new genetic code has allowed us to expand the scope of biological function in a number of powerful ways."

The creation of a genomically recoded organism raises the possibility that researchers might be able to retool nature and create potent new forms of proteins to accomplish a myriad purposes from combating disease to generating new classes of materials.

The research headed by Isaacs and co-author George Church of Harvard Medical School is a product of years of studies in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which seeks to re-design natural biological systems for useful purposes.

In this case, the researchers changed fundamental rules of biology.

Proteins, which are encoded by DNA's instructional manual and are made up of 20 amino acids, carry out many important functional roles in the cell. Amino acids are encoded by the full set of 64 triplet combinations of the four nucleic acids that comprise the backbone of DNA. These triplets (sets of three nucleotides) are called codons and are the genetic alphabet of life.

Isaacs, Jesse Rinehart of Yale,,and the Harvard researchers explored whether they could expand upon nature's handywork by substituting different codons or letters throughout the genome and then reintroducing entirely new letters to create amino acids not found in nature. This work marks the first time that the genetic code has been completely changed across an organism's genome.

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Researchers rewrite an entire genome -- and add a healthy twist

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17-Oct-2013

Contact: David Cameron david_cameron@hms.harvard.edu 617-432-0441 Harvard Medical School

In two parallel projects, researchers have created new genomes inside the bacterium E. coli in ways that test the limits of genetic reprogramming and open new possibilities for increasing flexibility, productivity and safety in biotechnology.

In one project, researchers created a novel genomethe first-ever entirely genomically recoded organismby replacing all 321 instances of a specific "genetic three-letter word," called a codon, throughout the organism's entire genome with a word of supposedly identical meaning. The researchers then reintroduced a reprogramed version of the original word (with a new meaning, a new amino acid) into the bacteria, expanding the bacterium's vocabulary and allowing it to produce proteins that do not normally occur in nature.

In the second project, the researchers removed every occurrence of 13 different codons across 42 separate E. coli genes, using a different organism for each gene, and replaced them with other codons of the same function. When they were done, 24 percent of the DNA across the 42 targeted genes had been changed, yet the proteins the genes produced remained identical to those produced by the original genes.

"The first project is saying that we can take one codon, completely remove it from the genome, then successfully reassign its function," said Marc Lajoie, a Harvard Medical School graduate student in the lab of George Church. "For the second project we asked, 'OK, we've changed this one codon, how many others can we change?'"

Of the 13 codons chosen for the project, all could be changed.

"That leaves open the possibility that we could potentially replace any or all of those 13 codons throughout the entire genome," Lajoie said.

The results of these two projects appear today in Science. The work was led by Church, Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and founding core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Farren Isaacs, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale School of Medicine, is co-senior author on the first study.

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Researchers advance toward engineering 'wildly new genome'