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SUMMARY:Sustaining Life with Genes and Proteins Designed ‘From Scratch
 ’ - Professor Michael Hecht\, Department of Chemistry\, Princeton Univer
 sity
DTSTART:20190508T093000Z
DTEND:20190508T103000Z
UID:TALK124036@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Georg Meisl
DESCRIPTION:A key goal of synthetic biology is to design novel proteins th
 at fold and function in vivo. A particularly\nchallenging objective would 
 be to produce non-natural proteins that don’t merely generate\ninteresti
 ng phenotypes\, but which actually provide essential functions necessary f
 or the growth of\nliving cells. Successful design of such life-sustaining 
 proteins would represent a key step toward\nconstructing “artificial pro
 teomes” of non-natural sequences. In initial work toward this goal\, we\
 ndesigned large libraries of novel proteins encoded by millions of synthet
 ic genes. Many of these new\nproteins fold into stable 3-dimensional struc
 tures\; and many bind biologically relevant metals\,\nmetabolites\, and co
 factors. Several of the novel proteins function in vivo to provide essenti
 al\nactivities necessary to sustain the growth of E. coli cells. In some c
 ases\, these novel proteins rewire\ngene regulation and alter the expressi
 on of endogenous genes. In other cases\, the novel protein\nsustains cell 
 growth by functioning as a bona fide enzyme that catalyzes an essential bi
 ochemical\nreaction. These results suggest that (i) the molecular toolkit 
 of life need not be limited to sequences\nthat already exist in nature\, a
 nd (ii) artificial genomes and proteomes might be built from non-\nnatural
  sequences.
LOCATION:Department of Chemistry\, Cambridge\, Unilever lecture theatre
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