Changing the biological Rosetta stone: the (commercial) potential of recoded microbes

摘要

In 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean‐François Champollion announced the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, the key for translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby enabling an unprecedented insight into ancient Egypt history. Life has its own Rosetta stone, the genetic code, decoded by Marshall Nirenberg in 1960s. While the genetic code is universal (albeit exceptions) and has not undergone major changes since the last universal common ancestor, technological progress allows synthetic biologists to increasingly re‐write the biological Rosetta.