Mass Recoded E.coli Genome Not Tripped Up By Programmed Frameshifts

There's apaper this week in Nature announcing anE.coli genome which has had two serine codons (UCA,UCG) and one stop codon (UAG) removed from usage.   It's a major work on synthetic biology and represents the largest designed sequence ever built.   In contrast to Craig Venter's early effort, which moved a synthesized genome into a cellular ghost of a natural bacterium, this one replaced the nativeE.coligenome in stages --Escherichia theseusshipii would be a good name for the new strain. But is the genome quite what is advertised? Following up on a pair posts from Sandeep Chakraborty showing remainingUCA,UCG codons andUAG codons in a bunch of typical genes, I decided to look for a trickier set of possibilities to overloop -- and by luck or care the Nature paper got these.   Just to put one gripe front-and-center, the group deposited in Genbank the reduced genome version ofE.coli they started with, but not the recoded genome, which is in the supplementary materialRead more »
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs