GCE4All tools are shared widely to facilitate wider collaborations in understanding health-related processes like pain, cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s and more. Improved technologies could lead to more sensitive and specific diagnostic tests and better therapeutics. For instance, in cancer diagnosis and imaging, GCE enables the development of proteins engineered to bind specifically to cancer cells. These proteins can be linked to radioactive chemicals, which serve as imaging agents that allow precise visualization of cancer cells within the body. GCE provides clean and fast attachment chemistry, ensuring the imaging agent can be quickly attached, opening access to people with diverse cancers. Similarly, GCE could revolutionize diabetes treatment by allowing for the direct monitoring of insulin levels, which are typically at low levels and short-lived in the body. Attaching monitoring agents to insulin using GCE, treatment can become more accurate and safer. “Genetic code expansion is a gateway to better science and medicine. I couldn’t access all the GCE potential alone, but I can train as many people as possible,” Mehl said. To achieve this, GCE4All offers online training, hands-on workshops, a discussion board and conferences to foster community engagement among developers, users and prospective users. Partnering with Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid repository, GCE4All offers a PermaPhos Kit for academics and nonprofit organizations. The kit contains various substances needed to produce genetically engineered recombinant proteins with directly encoded phosphoserine, bypassing the need for special enzymes called kinases. By installing these substitute amino acids, the proteins can be used to study the phosphoserine modification effects on cell signaling, protein function and protein interactions. Since 2022, GCE4All has received 420 global requests for its Addgene resources and plans to expand its kit offerings. Expanding GCE impact through hands-on learning Education is central to GCE4All’s mission because greater access will transform future science. Since arriving in Corvallis in 2011, Mehl has overseen a lab course where undergraduates learn GCE technology for protein synthesis. Last year, Mehl and Kari Van Zee, associate head of Biochemistry and Biophysics, revamped the molecular techniques lab course, shifting from making modified proteins to building new genetic code expansion tools with students. “Our seniors love the ability to tackle their own ideas. It’s empowering, making new proteins and doing studies that have never been done before giving them a taste of real cutting-edge science,” Mehl said. “Having a foundation in fundamentally new technology provides students a huge leg up in the future,” Mehl said. “We are Statistician Katherine McLaughlin (left) and ecologist Benjamin Dalziel (right) combine mathematics, communications and engineering to model, predict, identify, track and mitigate future pandemics. 8 OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY / COLLEGE OF SCIENCE
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==