![]() ![]() When an invading virus injects its own genetic code full of TCG and TCA and tries to tell the E. “Leucine is about as different from serine as you can get, physically and chemically,” said Nyerges. When these tRNAs see TCG or TCA, they add leucine instead of serine. The HMS team now added new, trickster tRNAs in their place. The team had also removed the corresponding tRNAs. In this case, the Cambridge team had deleted TCG along with sister codon TCA, which also calls for serine. For instance, the codon TCG tells its matching tRNA to attach the amino acid serine. So, Nyerges and colleagues developed a way to change what those codons tell an organism to make - something scientists hadn’t done to this extent in living cells.Įach tRNA’s role is to recognize a specific codon and add the corresponding amino acid to a protein that’s being built. Some viruses were bringing in their own equipment to get around the missing pieces. The HMS team, however, figured out that deleting codons wasn’t enough. The idea was that viruses wouldn’t be able to hijack the cells because they couldn’t replicate without the missing codons. coli to make all their life-sustaining proteins from 61 sets of genetic building blocks, or codons, instead of the naturally occurring 64. The initial method had involved genetically reprogramming E. coli, including 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.ĭiscovering that the bacteria weren’t fully virus-resistant “was a bummer,” Nyerges said. When they sampled local sites rife with E. 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. In 2022, a group from the University of Cambridge thought they’d made an E. The findings build on earlier efforts by genetic engineers to achieve a helpful, safe, virus-resistant bacterium. Such biocontainment strategies are of increasing interest as groups explore the safe deployment of GMOs for growing crops, reducing disease spread, generating biofuels, and removing pollutants from open environments. The authors said their work suggests a general method for making any organism immune to viruses and preventing gene flow into and out of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The work also provides the first built-in safety measure that prevents modified genetic material from being incorporated into natural cells, he said. “We can’t say it’s fully virus-resistant, but so far, based on extensive laboratory experiments and computational analysis, we haven’t found a virus that can break it,” Nyerges said. “We believe we have developed the first technology to design an organism that can’t be infected by any known virus,” said the study’s first author, Akos Nyerges, research fellow in genetics in the lab of George Church in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Results are published March 15 in Nature. Currently, viruses that infect vats of bacteria can halt production, compromise drug safety, and cost millions of dollars. ![]() The work promises to reduce the threats of viral contamination when harnessing bacteria to produce medicines such as insulin as well as other useful substances, such as biofuels. 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 potential for the bacteria or their modified genes to escape into the wild. ![]() Image: An illustration of viruses called phages infecting a bacterial cell. ![]()
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