<i>Escherichia coli</i> with a 57-codon genetic code.

Robertson, Wesley E; Rehm, Fabian B H; Spinck, Martin; Schumann, Raffael L; Tian, Rongzhen; Liu, Wei; Gu, Yangqi; Kleefeldt, Askar A et al. · Science · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here, we designed and generated <i>Escherichia coli</i> with a 4-megabase synthetic genome in which we replaced known occurrences of six sense codons and a stop codon with synonymous codons. The resulting organism, Syn57, uses 55 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids.

Medical subject headings