Julius was recently quoted in “What Are Genetically Recoded Organisms?” in Popular Science by Francie Diep. The article is a nice read about the Isaacs’ lab recent Science paper “Genomically Recoded Organisms Expand Biological Functions”. The paper describes the first complete milestone of the rEcoli project (see here for an article about a previous Science paper describing the precursor) where they removed all instances of a rare stop codon in E. coli and showed the viability of the organism, its ability to efficiently incorporate non-natural amino acids in these codons, and actually be more resistant to certain bacteriophages. It’s a huge first step to implementing a completely different genetic code, which is sure to provide amazing biotechnological advances, as well as give us new insights into how life itself works.
Paper Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/357
Lucks Laboratory 