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Scientists Create Synthesized DNA Bases
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego have created two artificial DNA bases in an effort to "expand biology's potential." "In the future, [chemist Floyd] Romesberg envisions manipulating the genetic code of bacteria in order to assemble better drugs or even man-made proteins. Until now, the bases only work in bacteria, so human augmentation is currently not possible. Another option is to use alpha and beta to help construct nanomachines to be used for drug delivery. 'This is like jumping from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age,' Romesberg says. 'It takes time to figure out how best to use metal.'" Update 18:10 GMT by SM: Roger writes to share the NewScientist link with a bit more information. There is also the original release text for consideration.
Can we get back our Vitamin C gene again? I would love being able to eat less fruit... Scurvy sucks.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I, for one, welcome our new synthesized DNA-base based overlords.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
There is a more technical explanation in the link at the end of the article.
He's adding new bases which have no coding to amino acids. I don't see the purpose of this. Is it just for adding a trace or marker in DNA?
All the bases do are code for amino acids and it's the amino acid sequence which accounts for a protein's shape. In the end it's the protein's shape that matters for chemical interactions.
Now they can get to work on making me a hot Draenei chick with a proper ghetto booty.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Has this not already been posted?
Interesting, but I'd rather we have a better understanding of current genetic material and manipulation thereof before we go creating new bases that don't exist in nature.
This might just be an approrpiate time for the 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag.
Further on, I don't think we'll want to be shackled by our past at all. At some point in posthumanity, you'll just be able to comprehend better systems and think of the DNA-based life as just outdated. We already have far better information density in more stable forms. DNA does happen to do a good job in making use of its own information, but that is not nearly as efficient a process. Think of the early sound and graphics chips that were soldered onto NES cartridges. It did its job, but something else came along and put it in a museum.
For those of you who forgot your biology, 3 DNA consecutive DNA base pairs (called a codon) are translated into a single amino acid. (Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg won the 1968 Noble prize in medicine for figuring this out and determining the mapping from base pairs to amino acids)
So, after reading the technical article, it says that DNA polymerase can bind to the new base pairs (allowing it to replicate), but it doesn't say what amino acids (if any) these new base pairs code for. That's important information because this alleged breakthrough is useless if it doesn't so something useful where proteins are concerned.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Two new DNA bases? In terms of potential gene expression - this is like the art world getting two new visible base colors, which can mix with the usual red, green, blue, black and white in new ways to create further complex colors... oh, yes it'll take a very long time to figure out what they mean in all these contexts, but the potential there is absolutely huge.
We're still limited to the same physical limits we've ever had - but the potential for efficient complexity and new expressions using genetic systems is what is possibly improved here. Of course, perhaps we'll discover that some non-DNA systems can be more efficient at everything DNA systems do by the time we can really explore these new DNA bases, but at the same time, assuming that these bases will self-replicate in the wild, we've also found new ways for "life to find a way" using good old DNA. This is really, really important science being explored here in any case.
Ryan Fenton
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/30/1449222
They should have just gone ahead and called them ADAM and EVE :)
If we're synthesizing bases you'd think that we could come up with better names than Alpha and Beta. If you work in biology at all you know that these designations are already overused. If you don't, this is essentially naming the bases "one" and "two". BwwaaahhhhH!! Hopefully these are on
This is a crappy nonsensical blog post about a news story from three years before.
Where is the whatcanpossiblygowrong tag, like last time? Have the Luddites left, already?
'It takes time to figure out how best to use metal.'
I don't think it took too much time to figure out that the best use of bronze was to make it sharp and run someone through with it.
Proverbs 21:19
... all your base are belong to us.
nuff said
Welcome our new genetically modified bacterial overlords...
(sorry... I had to...)
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
All your DNA base are belong to us...
"It takes time to figure out how best to use metal."
to figure out how long you can stretch out your research funding so you can keep your plush job. Usually this is accomplished by publishing just enough of your findings every few years so that it impresses the prols and convinces the patrons to keep funding you because a 'breakthrough' is RSN.
Sig this!
So I don't think that there will be any breakthroughs in producing new proteins the classical way (DNA->RNA->mitochondria->proteins).
The sources also mention nanotech. This could be more promising, as the standard rules don't apply and any new material would multiply the available options.
Can't they just play with the Spore Creature Creator like everyone else?
The use of four base sequences probably optimizes the generation complexity to the coding/mainentance complexity. Six or eight base sequences are probably less energy efficient or less stable or something.
Although that might be a good approach for making new life forms that don't escape and outcompete native lifeforms.
The Slashdot Editorial board has been obviously spending too much time on their stupid book and hardware reviews.
This is VERY OLD NEWS.
Please sell this URL to Microsoft.
Cordially,
Kilgore Trout
Something similar has already been done as early as 2001. A team of researchers in Japan was able to demonstrate that artificial amino acids (instead of nucleotides) could be incorporated into the yeast translational machinery using five-base codons (instead of three). http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/29/17/3646
Nanotechnology can coerce the DNA sugar (ribose) into exotic chapes like tri-helicies, platonic solids, etc. However there are no known biological applications of these exotic molecules. They mainly demonstrate the increasing skill of nanotechnology.
...alphabeta never left- they've continued to offer the same great service and selection at every day affordable prices!
!#&*
I would suggest your logic here is flawed or at the very least belies a bit of a gap in understanding how evolution works.
All the other folk who have commented that this is like giving artists new colors nobody can see are perhaps a bit closer.
Once we got started with anything even close to DNA, I would imagine we were more or less locked into that pattern. Evolution branches more so than tries all permutations and possibilities. It seems far more likely that once life got going with all the support systems (RNA, tRNA, etc.) and current coding mechanisms that it would have been very difficult to "back up" and try something new. Evolutionary history is full of examples like this where for what a lifeform is doing at the moment something else would be a bit better (human eye and blind spot?) but there is no going back, per se.
From the scripps article: While the polymerase does not replicate the unnatural DNA with the same fidelity observed in nature, (roughly one mistake for every 10 million bases of DNA copied), its fidelity is reasonable (typically making only one mistake for every 1000 base pairs).
Fidelity is reasonable? Maybe for bacteria, but not in my body! You'd get this in you in the morning and you'd probably have cancer before dinner. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration... Still, they ever get this thing working with eukaryotes, and I'm gonna be concerned.
...either way you have to build your own new tRNA's with your new weird amino acids or whatever ready to be linked into your protein, but this guy's approach might mean that's *all* you have to do (plus use his patented system) rather than also having to proofread the whole genome repeatedly.
Here's a list of what you'd have to add to the organism (it's a little complicated, but you've definitely grasped the essentials):
1. A gene using codons incorporating one or both of these new bases to encode your novel protein of interest containing something beyond the standard 20 amino acids.
2. tRNA genes that have the reverse compliment of any new codons you've introduced (otherwise the sequence functions like a stop codon).
3. Gene encoding an amyl transferase protein that binds your novel animo acids to the tail end of your novel tRNAs.
4. Genes encoding the biochemical pathway to synthesize the novel animo acids you were using.
5. Genes encoding the the biochemical pathway to synthesize the two new nucleotide bases developed in this paper.
There's obviously a lot of work left to do before this gets incorporated into synthetic biology, but it'll be very cool when it does.
I always play female toons. I figure anyone that enjoys looking at guys for 2000 hours must be gay.
Also I don't usually play just one character, which is why I don't equate myself with my character.
And they gotta have really nice hair, because usually that's what you'll be seeing the most of due to the way the camera zooms in and out on the back of the characters head.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Even if I transformed a new gene incorporating these bases into cells in your body, the higher mutation rate is only going to affect the specific positions where the new bases are present. It wouldn't do anything to change the mutant rates of the proto-oncogenes and cancer-suppresser genes that are still encoded with normal As Cs Ts and Gs.
And this doesn't even get into the complication that sequences with the new bases could only be replicated in vivo as long as there's a supply of the new bases being synthesized in the cell.
Key point: synthetic dna bases aren't going to give you cancer.
I theorize that the processed that built up the RNA/DNA/tRNA/etc systems were highly optimized in their developmental stages. This new base pair is certainly less efficient than what we have. Any lifeforms that depend on it will likely be less stable than natural life. This could be a good thing. It could prevent then from outcompeting native lifeforms.
I would suggest your logic here is flawed or at the very least belies a bit of a gap in understanding how evolution works.
I have presented my arguments to back up my claim, which based on how evolution works. Let me try to help you understand it a bit.
Fact 1:Nature already produced another base that is never used in DNA, uracil. Understanding evolution would tell you this means that it did not do so, because there was no advantage in doing so.
Fact 2: The new bases are chemically variations of the old ones as mentioned in the New Scientist reference in the article. Makes sense too, otherwise they would not fit in the DNA chain. This means that chemical accidents over billions of years have probably already produced these bases also, but they were never used. If they had any utility in producing better organisms they would have been used. Same as utacil that had utility in RNA and was used there, but not in DNA and was not used there.
Fact 3: The new Scientist article also mentons other applications: building nanostructures, comptuting etc. There the rules are different, and possibilities exist.
Conclusion: The classical biological cycle would probably not have any use for these new bases, or they would be already in use. They are close enough to regular bases to be produced accidentally, and that is how evolution works. Again, this does not apply to nanotech. Rules are too different.
this is like giving artists new colors nobody can see are perhaps a bit closer.
Perhaps Rincewind doing a painting in octarine? (Pratchett reference, couldn't resist. Please ignore :-) But there have been new colors that are unused such as infared and UV. Artists don't use them. Why? They don't offer anything visible.
It seems far more likely that once life got going with all the support systems (RNA, tRNA, etc.) and current coding mechanisms that it would have been very difficult to "back up" and try something new.
Three basic errors in your reasoning
1. Evolution does not keep backups within organisms. An error produces a difference in a new organism and it either succeeds or (mostly) dies.
2. Evolution proceeds with unlikely events. It is the very unlikely but very fortunate errors that produce the new advantages that are multiplied over the generations and dominate. Easy of difficult does not enter into it.
3. The errors themselves are random. There are no "established" mechanisms that are exempt. The same is true for the very few fortunate errors. If they potentially exist they will happen, at any level, including the very basic support systems.
Evolutionary history is full of examples ... for what a lifeform is doing at the moment something else would be a bit better (human eye and blind spot?)
Evolution is full of tradeoffs. The one blind spot (eliminated if you move your head a bit) allows the optic nerve to be in the retina rather than in some layer below making for a faster and more compact system. Other example: Most nasal problems are a consequence of improper draining of the nose. These appeared when humans first stood erect (stop thinking that, you know what I mean :-) But again a tradeoff. There are many other advantages to being erect though (oh, go ahead, think what you like ...)
So, conclusion? If the new bases could have been used it would already have, by evolution. So they probably are not useful, in a biology and genetics context.
Maybe what we really need are aglets for DNA?
I know little of genetics, but isn't DNA "fraying" over time a big cause of degeneration?
If we could slow or prevent that, would it not have a big effect on health?
Now that they got the bases, what about the lead, drummer and vocalists?
What about Gamma?
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.