We have created the first life form resistant to almost all viruses

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ecoli
we have created the first life form resistant to almost

“I’ll confess something to you, I’m not a good writer. I am a good rewriter. I think about us, our history, everything that went wrong and this time I could do much better. “This is a line from Greg Kinnear in ‘A Winter on the Beach’, but it could have been said by any researcher in genetic engineering. We have. written forms of life from nothing, it is true; but what we’re really good at is rewriting them.

And the best example of this is the Escherichia coli which a group of British researchers have subjected to 18,000 small changes with just one goal: make them immune to viruses.

Beyond viruses

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The idea was challenging because what Jason Chin’s team was looking for was to take a bacterium and reconfigure it in such a way that the codons (the 64 “building blocks” with which genomes are built) incorporate two new functions: the first is create new amino acids (in nature there are only about 20 useful amino acids); the second is the ability to block the action of most bacterial viruses.

To get this bacteria “viral hijacking” proof, the researchers used CRISPR to introduce massive changes to its genome: enough to deactivate phages, but not so many that the bacteria lost its basic functional capacity. Do the E. coli incomprehensible to everything that enters inside her.

And, as published in Science, they have succeeded. For now, of course. No one has doubts that if this E. coli proliferate, nature would break through, and viruses would begin to “learn new languages” of molecular mechanisms. So, the most interesting is the ability to create new amino acids because on these new “genomic bricks” really revolutionary things can be built. And it is something that we are about to begin to see.

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Image | Charles Farmer, USCDCP