Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code
- Wesley E. Robertson
- Fabian B. H. Rehm
- Martin Spinck
- Raffael L. Schumann
- Rongzhen Tian
- Wei Liu
- Yangqi Gu
- Askar A. Kleefeldt
- Cicely F. Day
- Kim C. Liu
- Yonka Christova
- Jérôme F. Zürcher
- Franz L. Böge
- Jakob Birnbaum
- Linda van Bijsterveldt
- Jason W. Chin
2025-07-31
The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here, we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4-megabase synthetic genome in which we replaced known occurrences of six sense codons and a stop codon with synonymous codons. The resulting organism, Syn57, uses 55 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids.