Researchers create virus-resistant, safely restrained E. coli for medical, industrial applications. In a step forward for genetic engineering and synthetic biology, researchers have modified a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria to be immune to natural viral infections while also minimizing the p
. But then Nyerges teamed up with research fellow Siân Owen and graduate student Eleanor Rand in the lab of co-author Michael Baym, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. When they sampled local sites rife withincluding chicken sheds, rat nests, sewage, and the Muddy River down the street from the HMS campus, they discovered viruses that could still infect the modified bacteria.
In this case, the Cambridge team had deleted TCG along with sister codon TCA, which also calls for serine. The team had also removed the corresponding tRNAs. Viruses, however, also come equipped with their own tRNAs. These can still accurately turn TCG and TCA into serine. But Nyerges and colleagues provided evidence that the trickster tRNAs they introduced are so good at their jobs that they overpower their viral counterparts.
The team takes confidence in knowing that overcoming the swapped codons would require a virus to develop dozens of specific mutations at the same time.The work incorporates two separate safeguards. If another organism were to incorporate any of the modified snippets into its own genome, though, the organism’s natural tRNAs would interpret TCG and TCA as serine and end up with junk proteins that don’t convey any evolutionary advantage.Similarly, the team showed that if one of the’s trickster tRNAs gets transferred to another organism, its misreading of serine codons as leucine codons damages or kills the cell, preventing further spread.
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