See New Scientist article here. Here's a taste:
James Collins of Boston University says the paper represents an important advance for synthetic biology. "The team shows it is possible to introduce in a rational way large-scale changes in the genome of an organism. They have very cleverly swapped one punctuation mark with another punctuation mark, which opens up the possibility of rewriting the genome wholesale."
Even more remarkably, it opens the possibility of rewriting the genetic code.
Theoretically, once a particular codon – say, TAG - has been removed from a genome, the cell's protein-making machinery could be reprogrammed to assign TAG to an amino acid, instead of being a stop signal.
And if the amino acid were not one of the dominant 20 found in nature or a completely new, synthetic amino acid, then the cell could produce entirely novel proteins. "That's the vision," says Blattner, "completely refactoring the genome to where it is quite substantially different from any other life forms."
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