Syn57: MRC LMB Team Led by Constructive Bio's Jason Chin Creates E. coli with 57-Codon Synthetic Genome | Constructive.bio

The New York Times covered the creation of Syn57, an E. coli strain with a 57-codon synthetic genome — the most radically recoded organism ever made — by the MRC LMB team led by Constructive Bio's founder, Professor Jason Chin.

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.

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