Four letters of DNA write the universal code shared by all of life. Or at least they used to. Synthorx, a biotech startup in La Jolla, California, is designing microbes with an expanded genetic alphabet containing six letters, adding the synthetic X and Y to the natural A, T, G, and C. These bacteria have no counterparts in nature, and Synthorx is using them to design novel proteins that hold promise as the basis for future painkillers, antibiotics, and cancer-targeting compounds.
The company is based on the work of one of its founders, chemist Floyd Romesberg at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. For over 15 years, Romesberg tinkered away perfecting a pair of artificial DNA letters that would work congruently with the genetic machinery of life, but not be so similar as to get mixed up with existing letters. In 2012, Romesberg’s lab published the creation of X and Y, and in 2014, he showed that bacterial cells could replicate and propagate genes containing X and Y into future generations…
Source: MIT Tech Review