Breaking the rules of protein synthesis in living systems
On Friday 1st April 2022, as part of the Cambridge Festival 2022, synthetic biologist Dr Kim Liu questioned whether we could break down and re-write the rules in living systems to include more chemical building blocks.
The rich biodiversity of life and the complexity of life’s important processes come from proteins, molecular machines that grant a living system its variety of abilities.
These proteins which constitute life are almost exclusively created from the same 20 chemical building blocks, dictated by the same set of instructions – the genetic code.
Imagine the potential that another 10 new chemical building blocks could grant to life’s variety of abilities, Kim asked; could we perhaps endow living systems with new abilities that nature herself cannot currently evolve?
The recording of the conversation is .
