Researchers in Professor George Church’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, have developed a new approach to protein engineering that could overcome the limitations of traditional genome recoding. Published in Nature, AGENTEX enables researchers to design and synthesize proteins using up to 34 amino acids, rather than the 20 amino acids used by natural life. AGENTEX represents a remarkable advance in synthetic biology, expanding the genetic code and enabling the creation of artificial proteins without modifying the DNA of living organisms.
The platform achieves this by engineering customized transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and ribosomes and incorporating them into a cell-free system containing cellular components but no living cells. It offers a simpler, safer, and potentially more scalable way to design and synthesize proteins that do not exist naturally. The potential applications are broad, ranging from next-generation therapeutics and biomaterials to industrial enzymes and entirely new classes of synthetic proteins. Particularly exciting is that AGENTEX combines fundamental discoveries in tRNA biology with an automated engineering platform, potentially making expanded genetic code technology faster and more accessible.
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