A team of scientists at the University of Illinois discovered naturally occurring DNA-protein hybrid molecules last month, a breakthrough that could revolutionize genome editing (artificially altering DNA) and precision medicine.
There are four basic building blocks in biology: lipids (fats), amino acids (proteins), nucleic acids (such as DNA) and carbohydrates. The team — consisting of Zeng-Fei Pei, Natalia Vior, Lingyang Zhu, Andrew Newman and Satish Nair, a professor in LAS — found a naturally occurring “biohybrid” molecule that combines the properties of nucleic and amino acids — a quality that offers many possible benefits toward medical and genetic innovation.
“Proteins have the ability to do chemistry, nucleic acids have the ability to target specific regions to also carry this information; we found a molecule that has both properties,” said Nair. “You can make your protein go exactly where you want it to go. You can also turn genes on and off by making so-called artificial transcription factors.”
The team originally collaborated with scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, looking for bacteria that could help bind metals, when the group made the discovery.
Nair also said biohybrids could change the treatment of diseases caused by erratic long non-coding RNA strands.
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“What you can do with a biohybrid molecule is attach something that’ll base pair to a long non-coding RNA, and then the protein portion will probably either chew it up … or make it inactive by having it bind to it and destroying its function,” Nair said.
Long non-coding RNA strands are responsible for many biological functions, including cell differentiation and cell death. Malfunctioning long non-coding RNA is associated with cardiovascular diseases, neurological diseases and cancers, but since they are nucleic acids, the strands are considered non-targetable by current medicine. This could change with biohybrid molecules.
While scientists have been synthetically producing biohybrid molecules for years now, the process is painstaking and therefore impossible to upscale. Nair and his team’s discovery of a naturally occurring biohybrid molecule means this process could theoretically be offloaded entirely to the bacteria that can produce them.
“Bacteria have the capability of making all kinds of intricate things, from antibiotics to anticancer drugs,” Nair said. “We’re able to confirm that many, many soil bacteria have the capacity to make this molecule.”
Nair and his team will continue to work on the genetic applications of this discovery. They are planning to work through the Office of Technology Management to attempt to commercialize the “world of possibilities” that the molecule could be used for.
For a more in-depth look into the nature of the study, Nair and his colleagues’ findings are also published on nature.com.
