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This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
For years, scientists have been able to alter their organism of choice -- as long as it's one or two genes at a time. But Peter Carr and George Church, from Harvard Medical School and MIT's Media Lab respectively, have found a way to make sweeping, simultaneous edits across an entire genome. It is biology's equivalent of find and replace all. To showcase their techniques, the pair have started to overwrite the genetic code of the bacterium Escherichia coli. They have developed 32 strains where each instance of a specific codon -- three DNA letters that code for an amino acid -- is substituted for an alternative. These strains gradually fuse and the targeted codon vanishes, freeing up some genetic code.
Church and Carr's aim is to tweak codes to make modified organisms that speak a different genetic language to natural ones, making them immune to viruses or unable to breed with wild populations, eventually producing new classes of drugs or enzymes.
Explore more: Big Ideas For 2012
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
