Intellectual Property & Your Health Series - BioBricks and xeno-nucleic acids
- Shidonna Raven
- Apr 29
- 2 min read
Source: Britannica
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
Before you go to the Doctor!
Advances in synthetic biology
BioBricks and xeno-nucleic acids
Another scientist prominent in the field of synthetic biology was American bioengineer Drew Endy, who founded the nonprofit BioBricks Foundation. Endy was developing a catalogue of information needed to synthesize basic biological parts, or “bricks,” from DNA and other molecules. Other scientists and engineers were able to use this information to build whatever biological products they wanted, knowing that certain “bricks” would consistently carry out the same function in larger organic constructions. It was Endy’s hope that the BioBricks would do for bioengineering what resistors and transistors did for electrical engineering. Still other scientists attempted to create synthetic DNA with an expanded genetic code that included new base pairs in addition to the naturally occurring pairs of A-T (adenine-thymine) and C-G (cytosine-guanine).
A variation on the theme of synthetic DNA entails the synthesis of nucleic acids that carry the natural base pairs of DNA but possess a backbone made with sugars other than deoxyribose. These molecules, known as xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs), cannot be replicated by the enzyme DNA polymerase, which catalyzes the synthesis of DNA. Instead, their replication requires specially engineered enzymes, the first of which that were capable of faithfully transcribing DNA into the desired XNA product were reported in 2012.
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