The scientists put it this way: “Our methods treat the chromosome as both an editable and an evolvable template, permitting the exploration of vast genetic landscapes.”
The news review site links to stories in New Scientist, Wired and the NYTImes.
A new report from MIT, Yale, and Harvard describes in Science a way to edit specific stretches of genome and put new instructions, via a sort of “find and replace” system, right where they should work most effectively. And it can do this in different ways at many sites nearly simultaneously. While the MIT press release (see Grist) describes it as “rewriting the code of life,” lots of copy editors use another simile: hacking.
This is an important advance. It sounds like the new system not only can introduce new functions, but re-format a genome so it works on a novel operating system. They’ve liberated one, redundant kind of codon from its usual duty, freeing it to tell a cell to manufacture an amino acid evolution never before included in its armory. The reprogramming possibilities are so deep, it offer ability like turning fortran into cobol, or something like that. Old pal Vic McElheny, former NYTimes man, e founder of the Knight Fellowships at MIT and still a fixture on the biotech scene in Cambridge, calls it in an email a “significant synthetic biology advance” that amounts to “supervised introduction of mutations into an existing microbe.”
It also is a bit arcane. There is reasonable coverage, but not much of the screaming headline p.1 variety. That will likely come when such teams, aside from showing that they can customize an E. coli genome molecule by molecule, use the method for something dramatically useful.