Researchers advance toward engineering 'wildly new genome'
Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 21:30
in Biology & Nature
In two parallel projects, researchers have rewritten the genetic code of the bacterium E. coli. In the first study they created a genetically and biochemically novel organism by erasing every example of a single codon from the entire genome. In the second, they tested whether all codons could be swapped to a synonymous codon in 42 separate genes, while eliminating every instance of 13 codons throughout each of those genes.