Proteins with noncanonical amino acids can serve as precision tools and therapeutics, but their creation is often inefficient. In a recent Nature publication, Iype et al. engineered bacteria to ferry designer amino acids as peptide cargos, overcoming a major uptake bottleneck and enabling robust, scalable incorporation under routine culture conditions.

Bacterial ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters can be utilized and engineered to transport non-canonical amino acids into Escherichia coli for highly efficient synthesis of proteins with novel func...