The world's first functioning organism with an expanded DNA alphabet has now met another milestone in artificial life: making proteins that don't exist in nature.
The organism, a bacterium created by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, incorporates two synthetic DNA letters, called X and Y, along with the four natural ones, A, T, C and G. A team led by Floyd Romesberg published a study last year demonstrating that the organism, an engineered strain of E. coli, can function and replicate with the synthetic DNA.
Synthorx, a biotech startup that licensed the technology from Scripps, has now used the bacterium to produce proteins incorporating artificial amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
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