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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Optical Control of a Neuronal Protein Using a Genetically Encoded Unnatural Amino Acid in Neurons
Published on: March 28, 2016
Regulation of transcription by unnatural amino acids
Chang C Liu1, Lei Qi, Charles Yanofsky
1Department of Bioengineering, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA. ccliu@berkeley.edu
Abstract:
Small-molecule regulation of gene expression is intrinsic to cellular function and indispensable to the construction of new biological sensing, control and expression systems. However, there are currently only a handful of strategies for engineering such regulatory components and fewer still that can give rise to an arbitrarily large set of inducible systems whose members respond to different small molecules, display uniformity and modularity in their mechanisms of regulation, and combine to actuate universal logics. Here we present an approach for small-molecule regulation of transcription based on the combination of cis-regulatory leader-peptide elements with genetically encoded unnatural amino acids (amino acids that have been artificially added to the genetic code). In our system, any genetically encoded unnatural amino acid (UAA) can be used as a small-molecule attenuator or activator of gene transcription, and the logics intrinsic to the network defined by expanded genetic codes can be actuated.
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