Scientists Train Bacteria to Build Unnatural Proteins

November 30, 2017

(NPR) – Scientists say they have created a partly man-made bacterium that can produce proteins not found in nature. This new life form, the latest development in a field called “synthetic biology,” could eventually be used to produce novel drugs. The Scripps Research Institute’s Floyd Romesberg and colleagues have been pushing toward this goal for well over a decade. Three years ago, they announced that they had added two more letters to the genetic alphabet of a bacterium: To DNA’s familiar A, T, C, and G, they added X and Y.