Engineering Genomically Recoded Organisms with one stop codon

In a new article published in Nature, the Isaacs lab, in collaboration with the lab of Jesse Rinehart at the Systems Biology Institute, has developed a new genomically recoded organism (“Ochre”) with one stop codon. This research, led by postdoctoral fellow Michael Grome, advances our understanding and engineering of one of the holy grails of biology: the genetic code. The bioengineered GRO ‘frees’ two codons for the encoding of non-standard amino acids, opening new possibilities for safeguarding genetically engineered organisms and the production of novel proteins and biomaterials with synthetic chemistries. For more information, see Yale news.