We’ve heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous.<\/p>\n
Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth.<\/p>\n
They call their creation “Syn57,” a bioengineered strain of E. coli \u2014 yes, the same bad boy that can make you extremely sick if you eat an undercooked hot dog \u2014 which uses seven less codons than all life on earth. A codon, put simply, is a three-letter sequence found in DNA and RNA which delivers instructions for amino acids, a fundamental “building block” of life.<\/p>\n
For the past billions years or so, all known life on earth has used 64 codons. Scientists cracked the code<\/a> detailing which codons corresponded to which amino acids \u2014 mapping the standard genetic code, in other words \u2014 in 1966, revealing only 20 total amino acids.<\/p>\n Intriguingly, they realized, evolution hadn’t resulted in perfect efficiency, since some of the codons were clearly redundant. It raised a tantalizing possibility: was there room to trim some of the fat, engineering a more efficient organism from scratch?<\/p>\n First they just needed a proof of concept. In 2010, a team 24 researchers<\/a> detailed the steps taken to create the world’s first synthetic bacteria cell<\/a>. Though it was \u2014 and still is \u2014 an astonishing feat, taking some 15 years to complete, the faux-cell was still only a faithful recreation of the stuffy ol’ 64 codon version.<\/p>\n Then, in 2019, genetic researchers at Cambridge University were able to chip off at that natural redundancy and rework an E. coli strand down to 61 codons<\/a> \u2014 demonstrating without a doubt that life can function with less than the tried-and-true 64. The incredible feat was heralded <\/a>at the time<\/a> as the “most ambitious attempt at a completely synthetic form of life”\u00a0to date.<\/p>\n And now they’ve gone even further. To make Syn57, the researchers went through the painstaking processing of altering over 101,000 lines of genetic code \u2014 first in theory, then in practice.<\/p>\n