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Synthetic biology

GMOs in lockdown

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 13, page 125 (2015)Cite this article

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novel GMOs that are dependent on synthetic amino acids ... cannot grow in natural ecosystems

To generate GMOs that require sAAs for growth, Mandell, Lajoie et al. and Rovner et al. took advantage of a recoded Escherichia coli strain in which all UAG stop codons are replaced with synonymous UAA stop codons and that lacks release factor 1 (RF1), which terminates translation at UAG sites. Therefore, by inserting specific aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS)–tRNA pairs into this strain, the authors were able to genetically reassign UAG to encode sAAs.

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References

  1. Mandell, D. J., Lajoie, M. J. et al. Biocontainment of genetically modified organisms by synthetic protein design. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14121 (2015)

  2. Rovner, A. J. et al. Recoded organisms engineered to depend on synthetic amino acids. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14095 (2015)

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Authors
  1. Cláudio Nunes-Alves
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Nunes-Alves, C. GMOs in lockdown. Nat Rev Microbiol 13, 125 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3443

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