Researchers Clear Major Obstacle in Genetic Engineering of Proteins
Unexpected discovery about tRNAs leads to tool that can drive faster, safer production of new medicines
Scientists have been hard at work for more than 20 years to instruct biological systems, such as E. coli cells, to produce proteins they don’t naturally do. Success could mean faster, cheaper, innovative solutions for medicine, agriculture, materials science, environmental remediation, and other industries.
The journey so far has been arduous. It seemed that the best — and possibly only — way to achieve the goal was to reprogram an organism’s DNA, but that has proven fiendishly difficult and time-consuming and produces feeble results.
The lab of geneticist George Church at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has now devised a simpler, faster, safer, and larger-scale method to make new proteins without requiring genome recoding or even any organisms.
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