Unnatural Base Pair Overview
Uptake and Biosynthesis
Instead of feeding the cells with unnatural bases by supplementing them to medium, the biosynthesis of unnatural bases would be a huge step towards a fully autonomous semi-synthetic organism. The Botanical Garden of Marburg University kindly provided us some cuttings of the plant Croton tiglium, which is known to produce isoG as one of the unnatural bases we used. After an RNA extraction and RNA-sequencing library preparation, we identified some potential enzyme candidates based on the transcriptome, which could be responsible for the production of isoG.