Resumen de Fully recoded life form may be two years away
A form of life that relies on a fresh genetic language could be around the corner. Geneticists have recoded 5 per cent of a Salmonella bacterium's genome, introducing a record number of genetic changes as they did so. Now the race is on to recode the whole genome and put the microbes to work. This could lead to designer proteins not seen in nature, with useful properties and potential uses in drugs and vaccines, for example. Jeffrey Way at Harvard University's Wyss Institute and his colleagues have now used recombineering, a form of "crossing over" between similar DNA strands that occurs naturally, to make more than 1,550 codon changes in 176 Salmonella genes--the most anyone has ever done.
