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Scientists Create Synthesized DNA Bases

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the and-mother-nature-is-pissed dept.

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.

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I want my Vitamin C! by twatter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This has implications beyond the delivery of drugs. Drugs act at the protein level, but imagine a delivery mechanism that does not require a protein receptor, but instead acts at the DNA filament level.

    This is HUGE news.

  2. Article? by Rob+Simpson · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is a crappy nonsensical blog post about a news story from three years before.

  3. Bronze Age by wcrowe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    '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
  4. Re:These are bases not amino acids by tempest69 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    aarrgggg.... intergenic regions of bacteria are reasonably important.. regulation of the production of proteins is a really important process. being able to add an artificial control mechanism to genes that are guaranteed not to exist in nature is a powerful tool.. While temperature sensitive promoters are impressive, they still have some problems. But having a fully artificial promoter sequence should allow for some really impressive experiments once a bit more technology is added to the system. Plus it can make some really big changes in RNA folding..

    Storm

  5. Re:These are bases not amino acids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, while the science here is kind of neat, it's not the biggest news in the world. The article title does not at all reflect what's newsworthy here, anyway. Scientists have been creating synthetic and/or modified nucleotides for decades and successfully incorporating them in to DNA and RNA. The news is that they found a synthetic base that can be copied by DNA polymerase. This is the enzyme that copies your DNA, putting an A next to a T on the opposite strand, a C opposite a G, a T opposite an A, and a G opposite a C. DNA polymerase will now put their new base, 3FB, opposite another 3FB on the opposite strand, and they set up some directed evolution to screen for mutant polymerases that will do a better job of it.

    This is kind of neat, but the medical applications of this are pretty limited. First of all, it's unclear if RNA polymerase is able to perform the same reaction, or if only DNA polymerase can. If RNA polymerase can't insert a 3FB base opposite a 3FB base, then this news will basically go nowhere. An expanded genetic code is useless if it's confined to DNA only. The information in the DNA has to get into the RNA before protein can be synthesized, and it takes an RNA polymerase that can insert 3FB in order to do that.

    However, even if RNA polymerase or a mutant will perform that addition, there's currently no use for it. There are no natural tRNAs that will pair with a codon containing 3FB, and even if you add some 3FB-containing tRNA genes to an organism, you still have to get an amino-acylation enzyme to strap an amino acid to that tRNA (not a trivial thing), and if you do, it'd have to be a novel amino acid to really mean something. Otherwise, you've just found an extremely difficult way of doing what could have been done with the machinery that's already in place.

    This is kind of cool and all, but if Slashdot posted an article every time some scientist found a non-natural function of a given enzyme, it'd completely drown out all the articles hating on the RIAA, and we can't have that.

  6. Re:Maybe good for nanotech, but probably not genet by ChromaticDragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.