Sentences with phrase «genetic alphabet»

The newly expanded genetic alphabet, Thyer says, should yield a vastly more diverse menu of proteins with a wide variety of new chemical functions, such as medicines better able to survive in the body and protein - based materials that assemble themselves.

After 35,676 total votes and two rounds of voting, «Giving life a bigger genetic alphabet» won the people's choice for Breakthrough of the Year!

All life forms on Earth use the same genetic alphabet of the bases A, T, C, and G — nitrogen - containing compounds that constitute the building blocks of DNA and spell out the instructions for making proteins.

It was the first time that a living cell had operated using an altered genetic alphabet.

Next, Romesberg says he hopes to use his expanded genetic alphabet to create designer proteins.

But, as journalist Steve Connor reports, the reference to editing was intentional: «Scientists have used the genome - editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single «letter» of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.»

Adding just one more pair of «letters» — X and Y — to the genetic alphabet opens the door to 172 amino acids, which could be used to build new proteins.

For the study, Shih and his colleagues sequenced — or figured out the genetic alphabet — a part of the genome known as the exome, which contains all of the genes that can be expressed and make proteins.

It will swap out the chemical compound adenine for cytosine — or, in terms of the genetic alphabet, an «A» for a «C.» Because of that tiny code change, my bacteria cells will make the amino acid lysine instead of another one, threonine.

There are many more building blocks to life than proteins if you expand the genetic alphabet, says Steven Benner

Instead of four letters, their genetic alphabet has six, thanks to two artificial letters.

In July he and his team announced that they had sequenced all 1.8 million base pairs — the rungs of the DNA double helix, and the letters of the genetic alphabet — that make up the single circular chromosome of Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that in its wild form causes ear infections and meningitis.

For several years now, scientists have been learning how to attach the four nucleotides of our genetic alphabet to new backbones.

Using similar methods, he hopes to decipher the temporal order of more of the code — determining when each letter was added to the genetic alphabet — and to date key events in the origins of life, such as the emergence of cells.

But it might have arisen independently multiple times, says Powell, because repetitions of the same letter of the genetic alphabet are prone to errors.

As for our different ear odors, they came about because of a tiny change, just one little letter in the genetic alphabet that long ago granted an East Asian population a reprieve from both smelly underarms and sticky earwax.

Lab rats, for example, contain about 30,000 genes on a genetic alphabet 2.75 billion letters long.

These so - called APOBEC proteins seek out certain combinations of the letters that make up DNA (called bases), and, in DNA of viral origin, chemically convert the base cytosine into the base uracil — a change in the genetic alphabet from C to U that can disrupt a gene.

Over the decades, synthetic biologists trying to expand life's genetic alphabet have come up with a handful of alternative genetic letters.

Natural DNA consists of a ladder frame of ring - shaped deoxyribose molecules (which form the backbone of the double helix) and rungs of bases (which spell out the genetic alphabet).

To study natural selection, the team combed the International Haplotype Map for long stretches of DNA flanked by a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, or «snip»)-- that is, an altered base, or «letter,» in the genetic alphabet.

This symposium features several topics including extension of the genetic alphabet, selection of aptamers or DNAzymes, as well as studies in DNA and RNA epigenetics.

For years, scientists have been intrigued by the idea of inserting additional synthetic letters to the genetic alphabet.

Tinkering with the genetic alphabet also will help us better understand how life actually works at the most basic level.

A semisynthetic organism engineered for the stable expansion of the genetic alphabet.