Coupling genetic code expansion and metabolic engineering for synthetic cells

- Orthogonal translation (OT) of proteins with novel amino acids is well-established.
- Only few attempts made to couple OT and metabolic engineering (ME).
- ME is the basic prerequisite to transform OT to industrial biotechnology.
- OT with synthetic metabolism is a basis for synthetic cells.
- Synthetic cells are tools to study the core chemistry of life.

Orthogonal protein translation with noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs) has become a standard method in biosciences. Whereas much effort is made to broaden the chemical space of ncAAs, only few attempts on their systematic low-cost in situ production are reported until now. The main aim is to engineer cells with newly designed biosynthetic pathways coupled with orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs (o-pairs). These should provide cost-effective solutions to industrially relevant bio-production problems, such as peptide/protein production beyond the canonical set of natural molecules and to expand the arsenal of chemistries available for living cells. Therefore, coupling genetic code expansion (GCE) with metabolic engineering is the basic prerequisite to transform orthogonal translation from a standard technique in academic research to industrial biotechnology.

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