Research reveals a synthetic genome alters codons in Escherichia coli, suggesting new genetic engineering potential.
The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4 Mb synthetic genome in which we replaced known occurrences of six sense codons and a stop codon with synonymous codons. The resulting organism, Syn57, uses 55 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids.
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Robertson et al. (2025) studied this question.
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