J. Christopher Anderson

TL;DR: A general and rapid route for the addition of unnatural amino acids to the genetic code of Saccharomyces cerevisiae is described, providing a gateway to the systematic expansion of the genetic codes of multicellular eukaryotes.

TL;DR: This approach could be used to engineer bacteria to sense the microenvironment of a tumor and respond by invading cancerous cells and releasing a cytotoxic agent.

TL;DR: Using a novel genetic selection, a series of mutants of the E. coli tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase that selectively charge an amber suppressor tRNA with p-(propargyloxy)phenylalanine and p-azidophenylAlanine in yeast are identified and shown to be evolved tRNA-synthetase pairs that can be used to site-specifically label proteins with functional groups orthogonal to normal biological chemistries.

TL;DR: A synthetic AND gate in the bacterium Escherichia coli is constructed that integrates information from two promoters as inputs and activates a promoter output only when both input promoters are transcriptionally active.

TL;DR: This work suggests that neither the number of available triplet codons nor the translational machinery itself represents a significant barrier to further expansion of the genetic code.