Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Expanding the Genetic Code of an Animal

In this short communication Greiss and Chin show that they were able to incorporate UAAs into the nematode worm.  They are able to place lysine derivatives in the place of the amber stop codon allowing for the expression on GFP and mCherry.  They state that this is the first genetically encoded incorporation of UAAs into a multicellular organism.
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2 comments:

  1. Alex DeitersAugust 23, 2011 at 4:50 PM

    Definitely a landmark paper! However, the frequency of worm offspring that robustly incorporate the unnatural amino acid needs to be improved for real-world experiments.

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  2. Kalyn BrownAugust 25, 2011 at 3:39 PM

    This is a really cool paper! How could the offspring incorporation efficiency be increased? Is that something that could be worked out through orthogonal machinery/optimization or is it an inherent problem with incorporating into multicellular organisms?

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