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By Chintan Soni Proteins are powerful and versatile molecules with immense potential in medicine and the materials industry, but they are built from just 20 natural α-amino acids, linked through an α- amide backbone, limiting the range diversity of structures and functions they can achieve.… Read More »Co-Translational Incorporation of (R)- and (S)-β2-Hydroxyacids In Vivo: Directed Evolution of Efficient Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases (J Am Chem Soc, 2026)

Many genetic code expansion (GCE) techniques rely on the native ability that some organisms have to recode the stop codon TAG to incorporate pyrrolysine, a special amino acid not encoded in other organisms. Previously, in known organisms with this ability, pyrrolysine was only incorporated at… Read More »An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine. (Science, 2025)

Most scientists have a complex love/hate relationship with peptides, especially in the field of drug discovery. Peptides are encodable, for sure, but they are also structurally featureless and often display exceptionally poor bioavailability and cell permeability. In this work, C-GEM researchers developed chemistry with the… Read More »Chemical and ribosomal synthesis of atropisomeric and macrocyclic peptides with embedded quinolines (Nat Chem, 2025)

Researchers at the NSF Center for Genetically Encoded Materials (C-GEM) developed a novel and versatile chemo-ribosomal strategy to generate isolable quantities of protein-derived biopolymers containing site-specific backbone modifications. This strategy relies on an intramolecular backbone-extension acyl rearrangement (BEAR) reaction that post-translationally and site-specifically rearranges the… Read More »Site-selective protein editing by backbone extension acyl rearrangements (Nat Chem Biol, 2025)

By Joshua Davisson Better Flexizyme reactions! This paper describes a method to improve the yields of flexizyme-promoted tRNA aminoacylation in vitro. Inspired by possible origins of life reaction conditions, performing flexizyme reactions in an ice eutectic phase reduces some of the critical disadvantages of flexizyme… Read More »High Yield, Low Magnesium Flexizyme Reactions in a Water-Ice Eutectic Phase (Biochemistry 2025)