Summary
DNA and RNA are the building blocks for life. They
are the chemical structures that living units are based on. Now, scientists
showed that artificial genetic material called XNA can be replicated in a test
tube, similar to DNA and RNA. They have also developed a way to make XNA evolve
with desired traits and properties, and that XNA can evolve and replicate
itself just like DNA and RNA. Specifically, they have created XNA fragments
that could bind to a molecular target in the HIV virus. Scientists believe that
the discovery could create a new platform for devising targeted drugs to treat
a variety of diseases.
Researchers have been working for years with DNA and
RNA, and a limitation is that the nucleic acids break down easily in the body,
as compared to XNA, which does not. However, a limitation of the XNA is that it
isn’t entirely artificial and natural DNA is still required to begin the XNA
copying process. The ultimate impact of the work won’t really be known until
people have had a chance to try it out.
Science
Behind XNA
The “X” in XNA stands for “xeno”,
the “xeno” prefix is there to indicate to scientists that one of the
ingredients that would normally be found in either DNA or RNA is different.
Foreign, if you will.
The molecules that make up XNA are
almost identical to RNA and DNA molecules, except that in XNA nucleotides
deoxyribose and ribose sugar groups found in RNA and DNA have been replaced.
Some of these replacement molecules have four carbon atoms compared to the
standard five. There are some that have seven carbon within them, and it
is these modifications that make XNAs function identically to RNA and DNAs, but
they are also what makes the XNA foreign.
Vitor Pinheiror, one of the heads of
the research project into XNA and it’s abilities, says that: “Any polymer can
store information. What makes DNA and RNA unique is that the information within
them can be accessed and copied.” Information that you can copy from one
polymer to another is genetic information that can be propagated, and it is
when genetic information that can be propagated that is the basis for the
passing down of traits from parent to child. At this, however, I wondered if this is identical to the sexual reproduction that humans, specifically, undergo. I guessed that it is, for they both accomplish the same thing.
What Pinheiro’s team did was develop
technique called compartmentalized self-tagging. What this does is it not only
takes XNA and synthesize it into the DNA “language”, but also takes that
synthesized DNA back into the XNA
“language”. This results in the propagation of genetic information, which means
that XNA can evolve and pass on traits to offspring. This is done with a high
percent of accuracy, which Pinheiro says is essential for evolution. Without this accuracy, evolution would fail to happen.
One of the issues with using XNA is
that it is difficult to develop an XNA system within a cell, as it is not yet
capable of self replication or evolving on it’s own. At this point I want to know what next steps are required to accomplish this, as the benefits of XNA are limitless.
Bibliography
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2012.
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