By Piyush Diwan

Scientists have claimed that they have developed a new life operating system by altering the genetic code. This could result in the creation of proteins with certain properties which were never seen before. The research could help created drugs which can be taken orally without being destroyed by the acids in the digestive system.

The new genetic language was developed with the help of ribosome that can read instructions. Scientifics have been trying to incorporate these structurally modified amino acids with different physicochemical and biological properties into proteins from a long time.

Jason Chin of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK and his team has altered and redesigned the structure of the cell and enabled it to read the genetic code in quadruplets rather than conventional nucleotides which are read in triplets.

Every three nucleotides constitute a single amino acid. There are 64 possible triplet combinations of four nucleotide letters and the generic code is referred to as codons.

The codon either codes for an amino acid or stops making a protein. The team was able to create 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that do not exist.

In the experiment the team redesigned three pieces of cellular machinery which was producing proteins. The test was proven by them as they assigned two unnatural amino acids to their quadruplet codons and incorporated into a protein chain.

Further amino acids could react with each other to create a chemical bond which was different than that of three-dimensional code. These bonds were also stronger which enables proteins to work at different environments against the normal ones which can be broken by heat or acidity.

The findings of the study were published in the Nature journal. The research as garnered a very positive response from the scientific community. A student in the field described it as "a truly important piece of science" while another person involved in the field said it is a "milestone contribution to the protein chemistry field".

Source: TopNews.in