Category Archives: Transhuman News

Minecraft - Attack Of The B-Team Ep 11 - DNA Madness (B-Team Modpack) HD
Attack of the B-Team was designed with one thing in mind, crazy mad science! With the help of the B-Team Technic hand picked the wackiest mods they could find and shoved them all in a modpack...

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Minecraft - Attack Of The B-Team Ep 11 - DNA Madness (B-Team Modpack) HD - Video

An engineered bacterium is able to copy DNA that contains unnatural genetic code

The addition of new letters to the 'alphabet of life' could enable biologists to vastly expand the range of proteins that they could synthesize. Credit: National Nanotechnology Initiative

For billions of years, the history of life has been written with just four letters A, T, C and G, the labels given to the DNA subunits contained in all organisms. That alphabet has just grown longer, researchers announce, with the creation of a living cell that has two 'foreign' DNA building blocks in its genome.

Hailed as a breakthrough by other scientists, the work is a step towards the synthesis of cells able to churn out drugs and other useful molecules. It also raises the possibility that cells could one day be engineered without any of the four DNA bases used by all organisms on Earth.

What we have now is a living cell that literally stores increased genetic information, says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who led the 15-year effort. Their research appears online today inNature.

Each strand of the DNA's double helix has a backbone of sugar molecules and, attached to it, chemical subunits known as bases. There are four different bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). These letters represent the code for the amino-acid building blocks that make up proteins. The bases bind the two DNA strands together, with an A always bonding to a T on the opposite strand (and vice versa), and C and G doing likewise.

Test-tube letters Scientists first questioned whether life could store information using other chemical groups in the 1960s. But it wasnt until 1989 that Steven Benner, then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and his team coaxed modified forms of cytosine and guanine into DNA molecules. In test-tube reactions, strands made of these funny letters, as Benner calls them, copied themselves and encoded RNA and proteins.

The bases engineered by Romesbergs team are more alien, bearing little chemical resemblance to the four natural ones, Benner says. In a 2008 paper, and in follow-up experiments, the group reported efforts to pair chemicals together from a list of 60 candidates and screen the 3,600 resulting combinations. They identified a pair of bases, known as d5SICS and dNaM, that looked promising. In particular, the molecules had to be compatible with the enzymatic machinery that copies and translates DNA.

We didnt even think back then that we could move into an organism with this base pair, says Denis Malyshev, a former graduate student in Romesbergs lab who is first author of the new paper. Working with test-tube reactions, the scientists succeeded in getting their unnatural base pair to copy itself and be transcribed into RNA, which required the bases to be recognized by enzymes that had evolved to use A, T, C and G.

The first challenge to creating this alien life was to get cells to accept the foreign bases needed to maintain the molecule in DNA through repeated rounds of cell division, during which DNA is copied. The team engineered the bacteriumEscherichia colito express a gene from a diatom a single-celled alga encoding a protein that allowed the molecules to pass through the bacterium's membrane.

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First Life with "Alien" DNA Created in Lab

Cells with an expanded genetic alphabet could potentially make a wider range of proteins. Image: Synthorx

One of the first things you learn in Biology 101 is that the genetic code consists of four letters: A, T, C, and G. Each represents a chemical building block of DNA, the molecule that encodes the information necessary to build life as we know it. But what if we didnt have to settle for just four letters? Now, scientists have accomplished something once thought impossible: Theyve created cells with an expanded genetic alphabet that includes two more letters.

We now have a cell that survives and lives with more information in its genome, said Floyd Romesberg, the synthetic biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California who led the work.

Having more letters to work with potentially opens the door to a huge range of novel molecules. (A rough analogy: Just think how many crazy new words you could spell with 39 letters instead of the usual 26). With further refinements, synthetic cells might one day be used to createor evolveproteins that dont exist in nature, as well as new sequences of DNA and RNA, any of which could be useful for research, diagnosing disease, or creating new therapies. But thats still a ways off.

Romesberg says his lab spent 15 years developingDNA with two extra letters. In chemical terms, the letters are nucleotides, the components of DNA whose sequences spell out instructions for making proteins. Cells, you may remember, make proteins by transcribing DNA into RNA and using the RNA as a template to string together amino acids into proteins. Cells also have to copy their DNA each time they divide to make more cells. The biggest challenge, Romesberg says, was making sure the two new nucleotides played nice with the enzymes that do all this copying and transcribing.

In 2012, the scientists reported a breakthrough: They showed that six-letter DNA theyd created could be successfully copied and transcribed into RNA in test tube experiments.

In a new study, scientists put six-letter DNA into E. coli bacteria. Image: Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS)

But could six-letter DNA actually function in the far more complex and chaotic environment of a living cell?

The new study suggests it can. Romesberg and colleagues managed to coax E. coli bacteria into taking up their six-letter DNA and making copies of it. The cells enzymes copied the two new letters, which the scientists call X and Y for short (not to be confused with the X and Y chromosomes that differentiate boys from girls), along with the usual four. The cells grew a little more slowly than normal, but otherwise seemed no worse for wear, the team reports today in Nature.

The work is a major accomplishment, says Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida. He says its the first time anyone has shown that living cells can replicate alien DNA built from parts other than the four letters that occur in nature.

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Biologists Create Cells With 6 DNA Letters, Instead of Just 4

LEBANON, OR (KPTV) -

DNA evidence led to an arrest and a major haul of suspected stolen goods nearly a year after a burglary was first reported in Lebanon.

Deputies were called out to a home on Stoltz Hill Road on May 9, 2013. The caller reported that their neighbors were out of state and someone had broken into their home.

When the victims returned home, it was determined that more than $67,000 worth of property had been stolen, including 10 guns, an ATV, a large coin collection, U.S. savings bonds, jewelry, home electronics, chainsaws, hunting equipment and tools.

Deputies seized evidence and sent it to the Oregon State Police Crime Laboratory to be checked for possible DNA.

The crime lab reported finding DNA on the evidence but found no match in the database. The DNA profile was stored in the state and national DNA databases and periodically searched as new samples came in.

On April 29, 2014, a match was found, linking the DNA evidence to William Driskill, 35, of Lebanon.

On Tuesday, a search warrant was served at his home on the 600 block of E Street. Deputies said they recovered a gun and coins believed to be from the May 2013 case.

In addition, deputies said they found plenty of other suspected stolen items, including antiques, a specialized competition mountain bike, a car dolly and construction tools like concrete saws, air compressors and a cutting torch.

Metal believed to be stolen was also found on the property, including titanium, industrial stainless steel pipe and burnt copper wire.

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DNA match leads to arrest, major haul of suspected stolen items