Hot Plasmids: February 2026
Type
Blog Post
... engineered bacterial strain with a single stop codon
Improved mouse and human CRISPR knockout libraries... engineered bacterial strain with a single stop codon
By Emily P. Bentley
That's right: just one! Simple...simple to create.
Most organisms have three stop codons: UAG ("amber"), UAA ("ochre"), and UGA ("opal")...furthermore, UGA is sometimes recognized as a tryptophan codon (usually coded by UGG) through wobble pairing (Figure... to isolate each of these functions to a single codon (Grome et al., 2025).
Figure 4: Summary ...Created with BioRender.com.
Because both stop codons were "freed" of their evolved purpose, they became...Engineering a genomically recoded organism with one stop codon. Nature, 639(8054), 512–521. https://doi.org/10.1038...