LMB researchers create Syn57

In 2019, Constructive Bio’s founder Jason Chin’s laboratory at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) released Syn61, a strain of E. coli with a fully synthetic genome that functions using just 61 codons instead of the standard 64.

Researchers at LMB, led by Jason Chin, have now taken the next major step in genetic code compression with the creation of Syn57. To build this new organism, the team introduced more than 100,000 designed mutations to remove all occurrences of six sense codons and one stop codon. The resulting strain operates with only 57 codons while remaining viable.

This achievement expands our understanding of how the genetic code can be redesigned and provides a foundation for constructing more deeply recoded organisms. Such systems have the potential to enable the controlled production of new-to-nature biomolecules and to make biological platforms more robust and programmable.

The work was covered in The New York Times.

Read the article here

Congratulations to Wes Robertson and the LMB team on this milestone in synthetic genomics.