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Protein Synthesis Essay

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TITLE: Repurposing the translation apparatus for synthetic biology
AUTHORS: Benjamin J Des Soye, Jaymin R Patel, Farren J Isaacs and Michael C Jewett
BACKGROUND:
Proteins are crucial biomolecules for functional and structural roles in all living organisms. Generally composed of 20 natural amino acids, they can organize into several combinations to generate functional and structural diversity. However, this diversity could be further expanded through the incorporation of non-standard amino acids (nsAAs) into proteins featuring novel functional sidegroups. Investigating these efforts to exploit the protein synthesis machinery forms the basis of this review.

PURPOSE:
The authors first examined the development of the protein synthesis …show more content…

In amber suppression, release factors (RFs) encoded by essential gene, prfA, often result in premature truncation in native prokaryotic translation systems. Therefore, through supplementation in trans with recoded essential amber-dependent genes and RF engineering, prfA can be eliminated. Moreover, amber-dependent genes were engineered to terminate with ochre stop codon (TAA). Additionally, quadruplet suppression has been used for multi-site nsAA incorporation, which uses unusual quadruplet codons to encode nsAAs.
Cell-Free Protein Synthesis (CFPS) systems incorporate nsAAs in vitro, as its lack of physical boundaries offers several advantages, including, improved membrane permeability of bulky nsAAs. Areas of CFPS for genetic code expansion include, translation system reconstruction from purified components depleted of native tRNAs. These are selectively supplied with purified tRNAs, thereby creating blank sense codons for nsAA reassignment. Second, mutations of the peptidyl transferase centre of the 50S ribosomal subunit, to hinder it from utilising native tRNAs. Lastly, self-aminoacylating tRNAs to incorporate nsAAs without the need to develop laborious nsAA-aaRS-tRNA scaffold pairs.
In eukaryotes, OTS components are linked to specific aaRS-tRNA pairs, engineered in S. cerevisiae or E. Coli, and subsequently transformed into mammalian vectors. This, when combined with amber suppression can modulate eukaryotic

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