Day: 27 May 2016

Those synthetic biologists are at it again

Source: Nature Chemistry
Source: Nature Chemistry

The building blocks of life are strangely asymmetrical. Amino acids can come in one of two kinds – left or right – that are mirror images of one another. Synthesise them chemically, and you get half of each. But for obscure reasons, living things make their proteins out of just left-handed variety. Meanwhile “natural” DNA only comes in one form – the double helix twists in a right-handed manner (D-DNA), and never to the left (L-DNA). Left-handed proteins, right-handed DNA.

But that doesn’t stop synthetic biologists from trying to tinker around with the chemicals of life. What if you could get right-handed proteins to make left-handed DNA? Well, it seems a group from Tsinghua University, Beijing have done just that (paywall, sorry). Zimou Wang et al. chemically synthesised a small DNA polymerase from a virus, using D-amino acids, and showed it could copy a short stretch of L-DNA. The reactions were painfully slow by normal standards – it seems the viral polymerase is very inefficient compared to the ones we use in the lab for PCR – but sure enough, it worked. It seems that, as expected, there is no chemical or physical reason why life should use one side hand over another. It just happens to be that way.

Who knows – if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it could be just like staring into the looking glass.

Been a while… so here are two new pubs

Source: Brewer et al (2016) PNAS
Source: Brewer et al (2016) PNAS

Getting a lab established takes some time and effort – and I’ve been neglecting the “news” section of this site! So, as a little update, two new publications we’ve been involved with in the past few weeks:

Congratulations to Phil Brewer and Christine Beveridge at UQ, who have been working very hard on LBO, a new gene in Arabidopsis involved in strigolactone biosynthesis. It’s just been published at PNAS – check it out! It included substantial contributions from Kaori & Koichi Yoneyama, among many others. And of course the local boys, Adrian Scaffidi, Gavin Flematti, Steve Smith and myself here at UWA.

Meanwhile, we four have just published a timely review on the importance of stereochemistry in strigolactone biology. We did not think it was a particularly controversial piece – it merely discussed the recent contributions to the field with a little interpretation for good measure – but we certainly had a struggle appeasing a fussy reviewer! Read it here as part of a special issue of Planta on strigolactones.