Bezerra Ana R, Guimarães Ana R, Santos Manuel A S
Health Sciences Department, Institute for Biomedicine-iBiMED, University of Aveiro, Campus de Santiago, Aveiro 3810-193, Portugal.
Life (Basel). 2015 Nov 12;5(4):1610-28. doi: 10.3390/life5041610.
The essential feature of the genetic code is the strict one-to-one correspondence between codons and amino acids. The canonical code consists of three stop codons and 61 sense codons that encode 20% of the amino acid repertoire observed in nature. It was originally designated as immutable and universal due to its conservation in most organisms, but sequencing of genes from the human mitochondrial genomes revealed deviations in codon assignments. Since then, alternative codes have been reported in both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes and genetic code engineering has become an important research field. Here, we review the most recent concepts arising from the study of natural non-standard genetic codes with special emphasis on codon re-assignment strategies that are relevant to engineering genetic code in the laboratory. Recent tools for synthetic biology and current attempts to engineer new codes for incorporation of non-standard amino acids are also reviewed in this article.
遗传密码的基本特征是密码子与氨基酸之间严格的一一对应关系。标准密码由三个终止密码子和61个有义密码子组成，这些有义密码子编码自然界中观察到的20种氨基酸。由于其在大多数生物体中的保守性，它最初被认为是不变的且通用的，但人类线粒体基因组基因测序揭示了密码子分配上的偏差。从那时起，在核基因组和线粒体基因组中都报道了替代密码，遗传密码工程已成为一个重要的研究领域。在这里，我们回顾了天然非标准遗传密码研究中产生的最新概念，特别强调了与实验室中工程化遗传密码相关的密码子重新分配策略。本文还综述了合成生物学的最新工具以及当前为纳入非标准氨基酸而设计新密码的尝试。
