Synthetic 'Upgrade' for Fruit Fly's DNA 
        
            By Linda Geddes, 
                New Scientist
             | 08. 13. 2012
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            The genetic code of the fruit fly Drosophila has been hacked into, allowing it to make proteins with properties that don't exist in the natural world. The advance could ultimately lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology.
The four letters of the genetic code, A, C, T and G, are read in triplets, called codons, by the cell's protein-making machinery. Each codon gives an instruction for the type of amino acid that gets added next in a protein chain, or tells the machinery to stop.
Jason Chin at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and colleagues previously showed that it was possible to reassign one of these stop codons to incorporate an "unnatural" amino acid instead, and last year they engineered nematode worms to manufacture such proteins.
  Complex proposition
However, fruit flies are a much more complex proposition. "They contain significantly more neurons; they can learn; they have all sorts of complicated behaviours," says Chin. "Many of the things we've discovered in biology have actually...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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