DNA‐templated organic synthesis (DTS) is a way to control the reactivity of synthetic molecules by using nature's

molarity Molar concentration (also called molarity, amount concentration or substance concentration) is a measure of the concentration of a chemical species, in particular of a solute in a solution, in terms of amount of substance per unit volume of solut ...

‐based approach. Historically, DTS was used as a model of prebiotic

nucleic acid Nucleic acids are biopolymers, macromolecules, essential to all known forms of life. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main cl ...

replication. Now however, it is capable of translating

DNA sequences A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases signified by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA (using GACT) or RNA (GACU) molecule. By convention, sequences are usua ...

into complex small‐molecule and

polymer A polymer (; Greek '' poly-'', "many" + ''-mer'', "part") is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic a ...

products of multistep

organic synthesis Organic synthesis is a special branch of chemical synthesis and is concerned with the intentional construction of organic compounds. Organic molecules are often more complex than inorganic compounds, and their synthesis has developed into one o ...

Base Editors

The DNA base editors, developed at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

under David Liu, allow altering the genomic structure of DNA. The base editors include BE3, BE4 and ABE7. BE3 and its later version, BE4 allow to change the

nucleobase Nucleobases, also known as ''nitrogenous bases'' or often simply ''bases'', are nitrogen-containing biological compounds that form nucleosides, which, in turn, are components of nucleotides, with all of these monomers constituting the basic b ...

C to T and nucleobase G to A. ABE7 allows to change A-T base pairs into G-C base pairs. The system works by rearranging the

atoms Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, an ...

in the target base pair and then tricking cells into fixing the other DNA strand to make the change permanent.

References

Biological engineering Biotechnology * Genome editing Molecular biology {{Genetics-stub