Chinese scientists develop fast insulin control switch

Chinese scientists develop fast insulin control switch

Chinese scientists develop rapid insulin control switches Chinese scientists develop rapid insulin control switches

Recently, Peking University's School of Pharmacy researcher Liu Tao's group and East China Normal University's School of Life Sciences researcher Ye Haifeng's group have collaborated to develop a gene switch that quickly regulates insulin expression, providing new tools for synthetic biology and cell therapy research
.

Related research results were published online in "Nature-Chemical Biology" on November 15

Researcher of School of Pharmacy Researcher of School of Life Sciences

There are more than 460 million diabetic patients in the world, and insulin injection is a physical or psychological obstacle that many patients have to face every day
.

Cell therapy is considered to be a promising alternative to insulin injection to treat diabetes.

Liu Tao's research group and Ye Haifeng's research group have worked together to focus on the protein translation process, using gene codon expansion technology to design switches directly at the protein translation level, which can span the transcription process and quickly produce insulin
.

Gene codon expansion technology is a technology that uses aminoacyl tRNA synthetase and tRNA to insert unnatural amino acids (ncAA) into proteins at specific sites

The researchers compared the regulation speed of the NATS system and the classic transcription level regulation switch
.

The results proved that the NATS system was exposed to ncAA stimulation for 1 minute to activate protein translation, and the target protein expression could be detected after ncAA stimulation was added for 2 hours

Diabetes is a chronic disease that requires lifelong medication.
Therefore, drug safety and patient compliance are important factors affecting the treatment of diabetes
.

Many ncAAs are metabolites of cells, and some are added to food or beverages

In addition, the researchers also built the NATS system on a variety of mammalian cells, such as stem cells, to regulate the expression of different target proteins
.

It has also been proved that the NATS system is compatible with the classical transcription regulation system, and the use of different chemical small molecules can simultaneously regulate the expression of the target protein at the translation level and the transcription level

The research has won the Beijing Outstanding Youth Fund, the National Natural Science Outstanding Youth Fund, the national "Major New Drug Creation" special project, the Ministry of Science and Technology Key Synthetic Biology Special Project, the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission Major Project of Synthetic Biology, and the Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology Innovation Support for projects such as open funds
.

(Source: Qin Zhiwei, China Science News)

Related paper information: https://doi.

https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s41589-021-00899-z