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RE: TIL - Synthetic Biology Could Create Safer Vaccines
This is interesting, I will be curious to see how well it works in practice. I mean, the non-natural amino acids still correspond to a codon (and all possible combinations are in play currently) so in the cell the codons will still put some amino acid there if the virus was able to replicate. Interesting post man. :)
Yes in the article they do discuss that a bit. They note that the codon that produces the non human amino acid in the virus is a stop signal in human cells. That basically prevents the replication from progressing but my molecular biology is way out of date and also I don't know how accurate that is since I can't see the actual paper right now. Thanks:) I think I will need to do some revision on this kind of stuff as my books are at least ten years out of date now.
Well that would be a good solution use TAA TAG or TGA and put the non-natural amino acid in with a tRNA that recognizes one of those. Then in humans we would not have that tRNA so the viral proteins would just prematurely terminate. Not much has changed (in general) in the past 10 years! Your books are still probably pretty accurate!!
Yes in fact they use UAG which I think (if I remember this right as it is hazy for me in my memory now) would correspond to TAG? I will check the books out and see if I still have the newer ones as I suspect one of my brothers may have taken it with him when he was doing his basic sciences at Uni. They are so expensive that they have a habit of going walkies on their own!
UAG is the RNA sequence, TAG is DNA. They are the same codon (the amber stop codon), I just write codon sequences in the DNA sequence form... perhaps its a bad/confusing habit!
Yes that is what I was thinking because you don't have uracil in DNA - yes they are amber stops. My knowledge is rusty though! Don't worry about it I understood what you meant.