Tsinghua team publishes “A synthetic molecular system capable of mirror-image genetic replication and transcription” in Nature Chemistry

Prof. Ting Zhu’s group and Prof. Lei Liu’s group have recently published an Article entitled "A synthetic molecular system capable of mirror-image genetic replication and transcription" in Nature Chemistry.

Figure 1: mirror-image genetic replication and transcription

The overwhelmingly homochiral nature of life has left a puzzle as to whether mirror-image biological systems based on a chirally inverted version of molecular machinery could also have existed. This work shows that two key steps in the central dogma of molecular biology, the template-directed polymerization of DNA and transcription into RNA, can be catalyzed by a chemically synthesized D-amino acid polymerase on an L-DNA template. It shows that two chirally mirrored versions of the 174-residue African Swine Fever Virus polymerase X could operate in a racemic mixture without significant enantiomeric cross-inhibition to the activity of each other, and that a functionally active L-DNAzyme could be enzymatically produced using the D-amino acid polymerase. The establishment of such molecular systems with an opposite handedness highlights the potential to exploit enzymatically produced mirror-image biomolecules as research and therapeutic tools.

Prof. Ting Zhu’s group focuses on developing biotechnologies to better understand the fundamental processes and mechanisms of life and to create synthetic living systems for applications in biomedical research and medicine. The co-first authors of this paper are Zimou Wang, a M.S. student in the School of Life Sciences, and Dr. Weiliang Xu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry. The co-corresponding authors are Prof. Ting Zhu and Prof. Lei Liu. This work was supported in part by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program, the Tsinghua University-Peking University Center for Life Sciences (CLS), and the Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases.

Article link: http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2517.html

Nature News link: http://www.nature.com/news/mirror-image-enzyme-copies-looking-glass-dna-1.19918