Ignoring the impracticality of trying to deploy this, codon bias exists for a reason, it's a translation-regulation mechanism and you'd wind up having to do a massive amount of protein engineering to not mess up everything.
replyHow would you address the non-interchangeable nature of synonymous codons? Do we know the right replacements?
replyWell, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.
replyThis sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?
replyIt depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?
reply"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1
"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9
"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368
Speculative whether it could be done with humans without severe side effects that would make it useless/pointless.
replyIs it a product available to humans at all?
What could possibly go wrong...
replyI've seen this episode before
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