New synthetic biology project could herald cheaper and more efficient biotechnology
Team of researchers awarded grant of more than £4m
A team of researchers from the Universities of Southampton and Oxford in the UK have been awarded more than £4m to develop a new technique for ‘clicking’ DNA and RNA segments together, which could make biotechnology research cheaper and more efficient.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is funding the project through a strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grant.
The scientists hope that their research could enable the production of useful DNA and RNA structures more efficiently and on a larger scale than is possible using current enzyme-based technologies. The project could also lead to the creation of previously unimaginable molecular machines with new industrial and medical uses.
Professor Tom Brown of the University of Southampton, who will jointly lead the project, explained: ‘At the moment, synthesising long DNA molecules by chemical methods is slow and requires a great deal of skill. To avoid this, biologists usually ask chemists to make large numbers of very short DNA strands, which they glue together using enzymes. These enzymes, which have evolved to work under very specific conditions, work brilliantly if you treat them kindly. However, they are delicate, temperamental, and refuse to work with heavily modified DNA or RNA.
‘We have found that we can ‘click’ DNA and RNA segments together using chemical methods that can replace the enzymes. These chemical linkages are stronger and less choosy than those formed by enzymes and can be produced in large amounts for industrial scale applications.’
The researchers have recently demonstrated that a bacterial cell can copy and read a strand of DNA that has been ‘clicked’ together, and enzymes can also use it to make RNA. It seems that cells do not notice the unusual 'click' linkages and so process the click-linked DNA normally.
Scientists are currently exploring whether DNA can be used to treat a whole range of diseases including certain cancers and HIV.
