Michael Hecht, a professor of chemistry at Princeton Univ., has led a team of researchers who have for the first time constructed artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells. The synthetic proteins were designed from scratch and expressed from artificial genes. He is holding samples of living bacteria containing the synthetic proteins. (Photo by Brian Wilson) |
In a groundbreaking achievement that
could help scientists “build” new biological systems, Princeton Univ. scientists have constructed for the first time
artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells.
The team of researchers created genetic sequences never
before seen in nature, and the scientists showed that they can produce
substances that sustain life in cells almost as readily as proteins produced by
nature’s own toolkit.
“What we have here are molecular machines that function
quite well within a living organism even though they were designed from scratch
and expressed from artificial genes,” said Michael Hecht, a professor of
chemistry at Princeton, who led the research.
“This tells us that the molecular parts kit for life need
not be limited to parts—genes and proteins—that already exist in nature.”
The work, Hecht said, represents a significant advance in
synthetic biology, an emerging area of research in which scientists work to design
and fabricate biological components and systems that do not already exist in
the natural world. One of the field’s goals is to develop an entirely
artificial genome composed of unique patterns of chemicals.
“Our work suggests,” Hecht said, “that the
construction of artificial genomes capable of sustaining cell life may be
within reach.”
Nearly all previous work in synthetic biology has focused on
reorganizing parts drawn from natural organisms. In contrast, Hecht said, the
results described by the team show that biological functions can be provided by
macromolecules that were not borrowed from nature, but designed in the
laboratory.
Although scientists have shown previously that proteins can
be designed to fold and, in some cases, catalyze reactions, the Princeton team’s work represents a new frontier in creating
these synthetic proteins.
The research, which Hecht conducted with three former Princeton students and a former postdoctoral fellow, is
described in a report published online in the Public Library of Science ONE.
Hecht and the students in his lab study the relationship
between biological processes on the molecular scale and processes at work on a
larger magnitude. For example, he is studying how the errant folding of
proteins in the brain can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, and is involved in a
search for compounds to thwart that process. In work that relates to the new
paper, Hecht and his students also are interested in learning what processes
drive the routine folding of proteins on a basic level—as proteins need to fold
in order to function—and why certain key sequences have evolved to be central
to existence.
Proteins are the workhorses of organisms, produced from
instructions encoded into cellular DNA. The identity of any given protein is
dictated by a unique sequence of 20 chemicals known as amino acids. If the
different amino acids can be viewed as letters of an alphabet, each protein
sequence constitutes its own unique “sentence.”
And, if a protein is 100 amino acids long (most proteins are
even longer), there are an astronomically large number of possibilities of
different protein sequences, Hecht said. At the heart of his team’s research
was to question how there are only about 100,000 different proteins produced in
the human body, when there is a potential for so many more. They wondered, are
these particular proteins somehow special? Or might others work equally well,
even though evolution has not yet had a chance to sample them?
Hecht and his research group set about to create artificial
proteins encoded by genetic sequences not seen in nature. They produced about 1
million amino acid sequences that were designed to fold into stable three-dimensional
structures.
“What I believe is most intriguing about our work is
that the information encoded in these artificial genes is completely novel —
it does not come from, nor is it significantly related to, information encoded
by natural genes, and yet the end result is a living, functional microbe,”
said Michael Fisher, a co-author of the paper who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton
in 2010 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Univ. of California-Berkeley.
“It is perhaps analogous to taking a sentence, coming up with brand new
words, testing if any of our new words can take the place of any of the original
words in the sentence, and finding that in some cases, the sentence retains
virtually the same meaning while incorporating brand new words.”
Once the team had created this new library of artificial
proteins, they inserted those proteins into various mutant strains of bacteria
in which certain natural genes previously had been deleted. The deleted natural
genes are required for survival under a given set of conditions, including a
limited food supply. Under these harsh conditions, the mutant strains of
bacteria died — unless they acquired a life-sustaining novel protein from
Hecht’s collection. This was significant because formation of a bacterial
colony under these selective conditions could occur only if a protein in the
collection had the capacity to sustain the growth of living cells.
In a series of experiments exploring the role of differing
proteins, the scientists showed that several different strains of bacteria that
should have died were rescued by novel proteins designed in the laboratory.
“These artificial proteins bear no relation to any known biological
sequences, yet they sustained life,” Hecht said.
Added Kara McKinley, also a co-author and a 2010 Princeton graduate who is now a Ph.D. student at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “This is an exciting result,
because it shows that unnatural proteins can sustain a natural system, and that
such proteins can be found at relatively high frequency in a library designed
only for structure.”
In addition to Hecht, Fisher and McKinley, other authors on
the paper include Luke Bradley, a former postdoctoral fellow in Hecht’s lab who
is now an assistant professor at the Univ.
of Kentucky, and Sara Viola, a 2008
Princeton graduate who is now a medical student at Columbia Univ.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.