(Image source: MIT)

BY: STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR: CHRISTINA HARTMAN

You're watching a multisource science news analysis.

There’s a new breakthrough in do-it-yourself DNA. Scientists have come up with a technique that may let them quickly reprogram bacteria’s genes. A writer for Gizmag explains.

“While scientists have long had the ability to edit individual genes, it is a slow, expensive and hard to use process. Now researchers at Harvard and MIT have developed technologies, which they liken to the genetic equivalent of the find-and-replace function of a word processing program, that allow them to make large-scale edits to a cell's genome." 

In case you need a genetics primer, every three-letter section of DNA is called a codon. Each codon codes for an amino acid, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. MIT’s Technology Review explains -- the new technique may let scientists build completely novel proteins.

“Cells can use 22 naturally occuring amino acids as building blocks to make proteins, but chemists have synthesized over a hundred so-called ‘unnatural amino acids’ in the lab using the tools of chemistry, not biology. … Organisms that could build proteins using these amino acids would open up new possibilities, particularly in drug development." 

So how do you change a cell to use unnatural amino acids? The researchers chose a codon that appears 314 times in E. coli’s DNA. Wired UK walks us through the next step in simple terms.

“Essentially you take a pool of water and chuck in billions of E. coli and fragments of single-stranded DNA. You zap the water with electricity so the DNA passes through the bacteria's cell membranes. What you have now is 32 strains of E. coli, each of which has 10 ... codons replaced..."

After they had 32 strains, researchers put them through a so-called “evolution machine,” allowing them to cross DNA. The first round took it down to 16 strains with about 20 codons replaced. Then another round, then another. But a writer for Ars Technica says -- they didn’t go all the way.

“And there, for some reason, the authors stopped. It's a technical paper, and the technique is clearly working, but it's still a bit surprising that Science accepted the paper without making them take the process through to its end point." 

Despite the fact the authors didn’t make a single strain with all 314 codons replaced, the paper is still being hailed as a major breakthrough. Science magazines -- like Nature News -- say cells reprogrammed to use unnatural amino acids could be a total game changer for biotechnology.

“Such engineered organisms would be genetically isolated from other organisms and so immune to viruses ... -- important for keeping industrially useful strains healthy. And altered genetic information wouldn't be able to contaminate natural organisms, because outside the lab, the code would be gibberish...”

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Transcript by Newsy.