Artificial genetic material (DNA) scientists have been able to build scientists in the US for the first time in history. But they did not stop there. While natural DNA includes only four letters of the "alphabet of life" (nucleotides), artificial includes six allowing it to make much more complex proteins, which are the building blocks of life. THE development this means that we will soon have new types of antibiotics, vaccines, cancer drugs, but also materials that do not even exist as an idea today. International financial analysts are quick to state in the "Wall Street Journal" that by a rough calculation the new drug market that will be created with base proteins and biological factors, in four years it will have exceeded 165 billion dollars in turnover!
According to study published yesterday in the scientific journal "Nature", scientists say they have created the genetic material with two extra nucleotides compared to natural DNA. Inserting the artificial, expanded DNA was not an easy task, as a special process had to be used to integrate it into the microbe's cell, which also had some pathogenic effects on the cell. "Eventually the microbe cell recognized it as natural material," says biochemist Floyd Romesberg, who led the research team at the Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla University in California.
"Most people thought that what we did was not feasible," says biochemist Steven Benner of the Institute of Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida. And that's because most scientists were confident that a normal cell would reject a change in its genetic material. "In this case, it was not just placed inside the cell's core, but it started and worked normally. We can not say that it was not shocking for us either. We did not know that there was so much chance of success, "explains Dr. Benner.
Genetic guidelines, ie if a blonde is born, with blue eyes, if it is predisposed to some illness and anything else we call hereditary, is analytically written in our DNA, which is at the heart of each cell. This code is written with four chemicals (nucleotides), which are also called the "life alphabet". It is Adenine (A) which is chemically bonded to thymine (T) and guanine (G), which is bound to cytosine (C). The combination of these pairs creates the molecular "recipes" to create the amino acids and proteins that are necessary for life.
With the ever-increasing knowledge and improvement of computers, scientists can now tap into life's natural information and storage system that is not-so-tightly locked inside each cell.
Today they can easily cut and glue normal DNA or parts of it to modify plants, bacteria and livestock. In addition, they have already used this extremely small DNA storage unit to encode everything from books and poems to music, and they have programmed DNA to do calculations that a personal computer does!
With the hope, therefore, to further exploit the potential of DNA, scientists focus on a relatively new field called synthetic biology. So, they are constantly investigating the development of an even wider genetic code that includes 12 bio-letters, something that has not yet been possible in a living organism that can be reproduced.
THE NEW METHOD. In the new achievement, experts have looked for molecules that would have the properties to integrate into the DNA molecule, in particular in the place of natural bases. These molecules should be able to form pairs with each other, as they form the physical bases in DNA double strand molecules.
After thousands of tests in the laboratory, they found two molecules, named d5SICS and dNaM, which met these conditions. Thus, they created synthetic DNA molecules (the plasmids) that contained the natural and artificial bases and introduced them into the E. coli bacterium. The bacterium, however, should be able to create copies of these DNA molecules, a process for which raw materials and specific enzymes are required. The raw materials (nucleotides with the d5SICS and dNaM molecules) were added as catalysts to the bacterial growth medium. Also, experts found that a protein derived from a single-celled organism could transfer these nucleotides to the DNA replication mechanism to place the enzymes in the right place and successfully complete the exercise.
