In DNA, C pairs with G and X pairs with Y?

Big news! I recently read an article in the Washington Post that wasn’t about our current political leadership, and I highly recommend it to all Biology teachers. An international team of researchers has published their findings in a paper titled, “A semisynthetic organism engineered for the stable expansion of the genetic alphabet” in journal PNAS. (If you like to also read the primary literature on these newspaper and magazine science stories, it is unfortunately behind a paywall.)

via NIH Flickr Acct.

I am no Eric Kessler, resident KABT expert on synthetic biology (synbio), but I was amazed by what I read. It is incredibly fascinating to consider the scientific breakthroughs that have been made during my teaching career, not to mention my lifetime. I was lucky enough to have Mr. Kessler as my AP Biology teacher when I was a high school student, and we barely touched on the topic of biotechnology in the halcyon days of the early 2000’s. Even in my undergraduate education, little time was spent on biotechnology and genetics labs. Fast forward about a decade and scientists are able to build synthetic nucleotides that can be copied into E. coli and conserved for more than 60 generations. This leads me to an obvious question: what will be possible when my current crop of freshpersons are leaving college?

Environmental biochemists have long hinted about the possibility of a microorganism capable of safely remediating oil spills and other industrial accidents. Could this lead to what amounts to biomachines capable of conducting targeted medical therapies in a patient? I have a sister with cystic fibrosis, and would like to imagine a time when an SSO (semisynthetic organism) is capable of producing functional copies of CFTR1, effectively curing her of the disease that once promised to take her life.

What was your reaction? What application would you like to see for this technology?

LINKS
Washington Post: “Biologists breed life form with lab-made DNA. Don’t call it ‘Jurassic Park’,” by Ben Guarino
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America: “A semisynthetic organism engineered for the stable expansion of the genetic alphabet,” by Y. Zhang and B. Lamb, et al.