Betül Kaçar

So both ancestor and the current cousin DNA, so to speak, and engineered all of these things to the modern bacteria and generated a collection of microbes that either have the ancient component or the variant elongator component that's still alive today, but coming from a different part of the tree.

Yes, because we were not supposed to mess with the translation.

That's exactly what we did.

And we altered elongation by changing it with different versions of elongation that are either coming from species that still are around today.

You can imagine them as sitting on the tips of the tree near branch, far branch, compared to the organism that we're working with.

Cousins, distant cousins.

as well as the ancestors of the bacteria that we are now modifying.

That's a very good question.

So mechanistically or mechanically, it's the same.

It's very conserved.

So all life elongates the same way.

It's nothing but a shuttle.

You just carry the chemical with you, the bit, to the heart of the machine.

It has its tail that's attached to the code, which is then carried biochemically to the linear chain to the core of ribosome.

And it sits on there.

It's released and the peptides click, the codes rather click.

Once that chemistry that is at the tail end occurs, the protein leaves the...

So you can imagine it's like it hops in there and hops out.

And when it hops and hops out, it leaves the information behind.

That's all it does, is bring the information, get out of there.