The first completely artificial living organism was created. Free Technical Library News

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Created the first fully artificial living organism

16.05.2019

Scientists have done the impossible and completely reworked the E. coli genome, eliminating all unnecessary from it and replacing the original genes with their synthetic counterparts.

With all the great diversity, life on Earth uses the same "language" - DNA. A handful of conventional chemical "letters" are used to create dozens of three-letter sequences, each of which conveys a specific set of information to protein structures. The four letters of non-glutinous acids - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (A, C, G, T) - can be combined into 64 combinations of three-letter "words", the so-called codons.

Modern life forms are represented by only 61 codons that form 20 amino acids. The other three are punctuation marks of sorts, denoting the endpoint of a particular gene's pattern in a continuous chain. Thus, our genes often use several different fragments to represent the same trait. This creates a huge redundancy of information, but there are good reasons for that. In nature, this allows the body to quickly adapt to environmental changes, but is it possible to keep the number of codons to a minimum under controlled laboratory conditions?

To find out, a research team from the University of Cambridge studied the entire genetic code of an E. coli strain and isolated each time one of three different codons appeared. Two of them mean the amino acid "serine", and the third plays the role of a stop codon. Then each of these triplets was replaced by one of four other codons that also code for serine, and even the stop codon was replaced by one of two analogs.

On paper, making all these edits (and there are about 18 of them) looks as simple as auto-replacing one word with another in an electronic document. But in practice, this is extremely painstaking work, since the researchers needed to collect a chemical copy of the edited genome and replace the original with it without killing the living organism. The team did this in stages, and after replacing each segment, the scientists were convinced that the bacteria continued to function as before. Surprisingly, it worked!

As a result, the Syn61 variant turned out to be the most viable - with it, the cells are visually longer and at the same time multiply 1,6 times slower. That being said, the "edited" E. coli appears to be healthy and works with the same range of proteins as the original version. For researchers, this is very good news, convincingly proving that genetic engineering is capable of literally replacing wildlife with synthetic equal nature to the extent that a person needs it, while preserving life itself.

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