(CN) — In a study published Thursday that details ongoing international efforts to combat certain incurable diseases, scientists made an open call for research involving viral vaccines and artificial life forms.
The paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science summarizes recent progress in the field of hybrid peptide-DNA nanostructures, an emerging field that is less than 10 years old.
The study highlights leaps led by Chenguang Lou, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, who joined Kent State University Chemistry Professor Hanbin Mao over the last decade to create a hybrid molecule that could produce artificial life forms.
In essence, the professors are working on combining deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA nanostructure with peptide infrastructure to create a new hybrid molecule with improved structure programmability and chemical diversity. Put another way, the professors are combining the precision of DNA’s control over cell programming and the large-scale chemical functions of peptides — both of which nature already utilizes together to produce proteins in cells that allow them to evolve into organisms.
As explained in the review, nature uses double-stranded DNA and ribonucleic acid or RNA to encode the genetic information of most living organisms on Earth through hydrogen bond pairs between cytosine and guanine and thymine or uridine and adenine. The chemical composition of DNA nanostructures — made of DNA that acts as a structural and functional element — are limited to the functional groups of four nucleotides, leaving them without much diversity.
But the same genetic information from DNA and RNA provides 20 different amino acids that comprise various peptides, including proteins. Once the amino acids are processed in a cell’s ribosome, the resulting proteins make their way to the endoplasmic reticulum for folding, where they go from primary protein structures to secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures. The process is an intricate one that is vital for performing specific functions in an organism. It’s also one that, despite recent advancements in programming, scientists haven’t completely figured out, the study notes.
The authors believe combining these two “nanoworld codes” will “unveil a new chemical dimension that the single use of each modality is unable to access.” The long-term goal, Lou explained in an interview, is to create a self-assembling system that can target and treat diseases, leveraging the strengths of both technologies while overcoming their limitations.
The types of self-assembling systems Lou and Mao hope to create could change the future of medicine: viral vaccines and artificial life forms that can diagnose and cure diseases that are, at present, untreatable.
Lou explained that a viral vaccine would involve creating a synthetic virus to trigger the immune system and combat diseases.
“If we can easily engineer the surface, let’s say of the artificial virus, but that virus decoy is the vaccine, it would be easier for scientists to tackle any virus in the future,” Lou said, adding that, besides bacterial infections, viruses are highly life-threatening to the global population because of the lack of antiviral drugs.
The concept’s fruition is only about 10 years out from now, Lou said, and creating artificial cells is also on the horizon. However, he said the latter will likely be up to the next generation of scientists 20 to 30 years from now, because creating artificial cells involves many elements yet to be controlled.
“But with the knowledge we have, there is, in principle, no hindrance to produce artificial cellular organisms in the future,” Lou said in a previous statement, and in fact, he and Mao already created an artificial hybrid molecule by successfully linking designed three-stranded DNA structures with three-stranded peptide structures in 2022.
Researchers elsewhere are succeeding in similar endeavors, as well, reinforcing the idea that connecting DNA and peptides can help develop more advanced biological entities and life forms. Lou said he hopes the publication will arouse the interest of the global scientific community while inspiring researchers to enter the new field and work together.
The types of diseases he hopes to cure, he said, are still a secret for now due to processing patents.
“We are trying to deal with diseases that are basically not on the market, they don’t have a queue now,” Lou said.
Looking forward, the scientist said he will not be surprised if humans one day “can arbitrarily create hybrid nanomachines, viral vaccines and even artificial life forms from these building blocks to help the society to combat those difficult-to-cure diseases.”
“It would be a revolution in healthcare," Lou said.
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