Based on the recent discoveries in the field of inflammasome published in Nature Communications, the PI received an invitation to present lecture as Symposyum speaker at 17th Congress of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) in Beijing in 2019. She also chaired two short talk sessions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 6747674
The considerable potential of engineered cells compels the development of strategies for the stringent control of gene expression. A promising approach is the introduction of a premature stop codon (PTC) into a selected gene that is expressed only in the presence of non-canonical amino acids through nonsense suppression. Here, different strategies of amber PTC readthrough in mammalian cells were tested. The use of a tRNA synthetase together with a TAG codon-specific tRNA achieved PTC readthrough depending on the addition of a non-canonical amino acid (4-benzoyl-L-phenylalanine; Bpa). While single TAG codon incorporation exhibited detectable expression of the reporter protein even in the absence of Bpa, the use of a double PTC enabled virtually leakage-free functional gene translation. The introduction of an additional 5’-PTC, therefore, represents a generally applicable strategy to increase stringency in gene translation. An example could be a small molecule induced expression of the N-terminal Gasdermin D domain.