Steven Albert Benner (born October 23, 1954) is an American chemist. He has been a professor at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and most recently at the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology (TWIST) and the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution. Benner has also founded the companies EraGen Biosciences and Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC. Benner and his colleagues were the first to synthesize a gene that encoded a protein, beginning the field of synthetic biology. He was instrumental in establishing the field of paleogenetics. He is interested in the origin of life and the chemical conditions and processes needed to produce RNA. Benner has worked with NASA to develop detectors for alien genetic materials, using the definition of life developed by the NASA Exobiology Discipline Working Group in 1992, “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”.
Education Benner attended Yale University, receiving his B.S./M.S. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry in 1976. He then went to Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1979. He worked under the supervision of Robert Burns Woodward, completing his thesis work with Frank Westheimer after Woodward's death. His Ph.D. thesis was Absolute stereochemistry of acetoacetate decarboxylase, betaine-homocysteine transmethylase, and 3-hydroxybutyrate dehydrogenase.
Career After graduating from Harvard University, Benner became a fellow at Harvard, receiving the Dreyfus Award for Young Faculty in 1982. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University from 1982 to 1986. In 1986, Benner moved to ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He held the positions of associate professor of bio-organic chemistry from 1986 to 1993 and professor of bio-organic chemistry from 1993 to 1996. By 1996 Benner joined the faculty at the University of Florida, as a professor in both chemistry and cell & molecular biology. He was appointed the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida's Department of Chemistry in 2004. Benner left University of Florida in late December 2005 to found The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology (TWIST) in Honor of Frank Westheimer. It is part of the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) in Alachua, Florida, which Benner founded in 2001. Benner founded EraGen Biosciences in 1999. The company was acquired by Luminex in 2011. He founded Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC in 2005.
Research Benner's research falls into four major areas:
expanding the genetic alphabet by synthesizing artificial structures pre-biotic chemistry, the recreation of the chemical origin of life paleogenetics, the study of ancient proteins from long-extinct species detection of extraterrestrial life The Benner laboratory is an originator of the field of "synthetic biology", which seeks to generate, by chemical synthesis, molecules that reproduce the complex behavior of living systems, including their genetics, inheritance, and evolution. Some high points of past work in chemical genetics are listed below.
Gene synthesis In 1984, Benner's laboratory at Harvard was the first to report the chemical synthesis of a gene encoding an enzyme, following Khorana's synthesis of a shorter gene for tRNA in 1970. This was the first designed gene of any kind, a pioneering achievement that laid the groundwork for protein engineering. The design strategies introduced in this synthesis are now widely used to support protein engineering.
Artificial genetic systems Efforts toward the goal of artificial genetic systems were first reported by Benner and coworkers in 1989, when they developed the first unnatural base pair. Benner and his colleagues have since developed a six-letter artificially expanded genetic information system called Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System (AEGIS) which includes two additional nonstandard nucleotides (Z and P) in addition to the four standard nucleotides (G, A, C, and T). AEGIS has its own supporting molecular biology. It enables the synthesis of proteins with more than the naturally-encoded 20 amino acids, and provides insight into how nucleic acids form duplex structures, how proteins interact with nucleic acids, and how alternative genetic systems might appear in non-terran life. Benner is one of a number of researchers, including Eric T. Kool, Floyd E. Romesberg, Ichiro Hirao, Mitsuhiko Shionoya and Andrew Ellington, who have created an extended alphabet of synthetic bases that can be incorporated into DNA (as well as RNA) using Watson-Crick bonding (as well as non-Watson-Crick bonding). While most of these synthetic bases are derivatives of the A, C, G, T bases, some are different. While some are in Watson-Crick pairs (A/T, C/G), some are self complementing (X/X). Thus the genetic alphabet has been expanded. The number of possible nucleotide triplets, or codons, available in protein synthesis depends on the number of nucleotides available. The standard alphabet (G, A, C, and T) yields 43 = 64 possible codons, while an expanded DNA alphabet with 9 DNA bases would have 93 = 729 possible codons, many of them synthetic codons. For these codons to be useful, Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase has been created such that tRNA can code for the possibly synthetic amino acid to be coupled with its corresponding synthetic anti-codon. Benner has described such a system which uses synthetic iso-C/iso-G DNA which uses the synthetic DNA codon [iso-C/A/G] which he calls the 65th codon. Synthetic mRNA with synthetic anti-codon [iso-G/U/C] with synthetic aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase results in an in vivo experiment that can code for a synthetic amino acid incorporated into synthetic polypeptides (synthetic proteomics).
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