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Construction of an Escherichia coli genome with fewer codons sets records

The biggest synthetic genome so far has been made, with a smaller set of amino-acid-encoding codons than usual — raising the prospect of encoding proteins that contain unnatural amino-acid residues.
  1. Benjamin A. Blount
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  2. Tom Ellis
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Over the past decade, decreases in the costs of chemically synthesizing DNA and improved methods for assembling DNA fragments have enabled researchers to scale up synthetic biology to the level of generating entire chromosomes and genomes. So far, synthetic DNA has been constructed with up to one million base pairs, notably a set of chromosomes from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and several versions of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides1,2. Now, writing in Nature, Fredens et al.3 report the completion of a 4-million-base-pair synthetic version of the Escherichia coli genome. This is a landmark in the emerging field of synthetic genomics, and finally applies the technology to the laboratory’s workhorse bacterium.

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Nature 569, 492-494 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01584-x

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