How would you address the non-interchangeable nature of synonymous codons? Do we know the right replacements?

Well, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.

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RandomLensman an hour ago | parent [-]

This sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?

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kanzure an hour ago | parent [-]

It depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?

"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1

"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9

"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368

	▲	RandomLensman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Speculative whether it could be done with humans without severe side effects that would make it useless/pointless. Is it a product available to humans at all?