Litcius/Paper detail

<i>Escherichia coli</i> with a 57-codon genetic code

Wesley E. Robertson, Fabian B. H. Rehm, Martin Spinck, R. R. Schumann, Rongzhen Tian, Wei Liu, Yangqi Gu, Askar A. Kleefeldt, Cicely F. Day, Kim C. Liu, Yonka Christova, Jérôme F. Zürcher, Franz L. Böge, Jakob Birnbaum, Linda van Bijsterveldt, Jason W. Chin

2025Science29 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

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-megabase 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.

Topics & Concepts

Genetic codeEscherichia coliENCODEGeneticsCodon usage biasAmino acidBiologyGenomeStop codonGeneComputational biologyRNA and protein synthesis mechanismsBacterial Genetics and BiotechnologyCRISPR and Genetic Engineering