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Long article about a partially created bacterium, more than anything it is a genetic "alteration". The next step is inserting the altered DNA into a living organism and "booting" it up, i.e. making the genetic sequence take over what it inhabits.
This could turn sticky..
Courtesy of The New York Times
Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life
Published: January 24, 2008
Taking a significant step toward the creation of man-made forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.
Skip to next paragraph Related
Web Link
Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome (Science Express)
While scientists had previously synthesized the complete DNA of viruses, this is the first time it has been done for bacteria, which are much more complex. The genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized.
The feat is a watershed for the emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves the design of organisms to perform particular tasks, such as making biofuels. Synthetic biologists envision being able one day to design an organism on a computer, press the “print” button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.
“What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist. He assembled the team that made the bacterial genome as part of his well publicized quest to create the first synthetic organism. The work was published online Thursday by the journal Science.
But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok. The genome of the smallpox virus can in theory now be synthesized using the techniques reported on Thursday, since it is only about one-third the size of the genome manufactured by Dr. Venter’s group.
In any case, there are many hurdles to overcome before Dr. Venter’s vision of “life by design” is realized. The synthetic genome made by Dr. Venter’s team was not designed from scratch, but rather was a copy, with only a few changes, of the genetic sequence of a tiny natural bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium.
Moreover, Dr. Venter’s team, led by a Nobel laureate, Hamilton Smith, has so far failed to accomplish the next —and biggest — step. That would be to insert the synthetic chromosome into a living microbe and have it “boot up” and take control of the organism’s functioning.
If that happened, it would be considered by some to be the creation of the first synthetic organism. The failure to achieve that so far has tempered the reception of some outside scientists.
“No matter how they praise the quality of the synthetic DNA, they have no idea whether it is biologically active,” said Eckard Wimmer, a professor at Stony Brook University who created live polio virus in 2002 using synthetic DNA and the publicly available genome sequence.
George M. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said, “Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together.”
Dr. Venter’s team reported successfully doing such a chromosome transplant last year, but it involved the natural genome of one type of Mycoplasma being put into another species of that bacterium.
Dr. Venter said each pair of donor genome and recipient cell presents unique problems. The scientists also think they interrupted the functioning of one crucial gene by their assembly process, a correctable problem.
“It’s not a slam dunk, or we would be announcing it today,” he told reporters. Still, he expressed confidence, saying, “I will be equally surprised and disappointed if we can’t do it in 2008.”
The bacterial genome that was synthesized consisted of 582,970 base pairs, the chemical units of the genetic code that are represented by the letters A, C, G, and T. The longest stretch of synthetic DNA previously reported in a scientific paper was about 32,000 bases long, though some gene synthesis companies say they can attach about 50,000 bases.
The machines that can string together bases make lots of errors, so it is not practical to make a string of more than 50 to 100 bases at a time. But some companies — the foundries of the biotechnology era — now make genes thousands of bases long by splicing those shorter strings together.
The Venter team ordered 101 such sequences, each 5,000 to 7,000 bases long, from these companies. They then joined them together into bigger pieces and still bigger pieces. In the final step, four big pieces were put into yeast, which hooked them together using a natural gene-repair mechanism.
The process was started in late 2002, Dr. Venter said, and undoubtedly cost millions of dollars. That led some scientists to question why someone would want to synthesize an entire organism. Scientists can already make useful organisms — including some that are now starting to be make biofuels — by modifying existing ones using genetic engineering.
This could turn sticky..
Courtesy of The New York Times
Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life
Published: January 24, 2008
Taking a significant step toward the creation of man-made forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.
Skip to next paragraph Related
Web Link
Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome (Science Express)
While scientists had previously synthesized the complete DNA of viruses, this is the first time it has been done for bacteria, which are much more complex. The genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized.
The feat is a watershed for the emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves the design of organisms to perform particular tasks, such as making biofuels. Synthetic biologists envision being able one day to design an organism on a computer, press the “print” button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.
“What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist. He assembled the team that made the bacterial genome as part of his well publicized quest to create the first synthetic organism. The work was published online Thursday by the journal Science.
But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok. The genome of the smallpox virus can in theory now be synthesized using the techniques reported on Thursday, since it is only about one-third the size of the genome manufactured by Dr. Venter’s group.
In any case, there are many hurdles to overcome before Dr. Venter’s vision of “life by design” is realized. The synthetic genome made by Dr. Venter’s team was not designed from scratch, but rather was a copy, with only a few changes, of the genetic sequence of a tiny natural bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium.
Moreover, Dr. Venter’s team, led by a Nobel laureate, Hamilton Smith, has so far failed to accomplish the next —and biggest — step. That would be to insert the synthetic chromosome into a living microbe and have it “boot up” and take control of the organism’s functioning.
If that happened, it would be considered by some to be the creation of the first synthetic organism. The failure to achieve that so far has tempered the reception of some outside scientists.
“No matter how they praise the quality of the synthetic DNA, they have no idea whether it is biologically active,” said Eckard Wimmer, a professor at Stony Brook University who created live polio virus in 2002 using synthetic DNA and the publicly available genome sequence.
George M. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said, “Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together.”
Dr. Venter’s team reported successfully doing such a chromosome transplant last year, but it involved the natural genome of one type of Mycoplasma being put into another species of that bacterium.
Dr. Venter said each pair of donor genome and recipient cell presents unique problems. The scientists also think they interrupted the functioning of one crucial gene by their assembly process, a correctable problem.
“It’s not a slam dunk, or we would be announcing it today,” he told reporters. Still, he expressed confidence, saying, “I will be equally surprised and disappointed if we can’t do it in 2008.”
The bacterial genome that was synthesized consisted of 582,970 base pairs, the chemical units of the genetic code that are represented by the letters A, C, G, and T. The longest stretch of synthetic DNA previously reported in a scientific paper was about 32,000 bases long, though some gene synthesis companies say they can attach about 50,000 bases.
The machines that can string together bases make lots of errors, so it is not practical to make a string of more than 50 to 100 bases at a time. But some companies — the foundries of the biotechnology era — now make genes thousands of bases long by splicing those shorter strings together.
The Venter team ordered 101 such sequences, each 5,000 to 7,000 bases long, from these companies. They then joined them together into bigger pieces and still bigger pieces. In the final step, four big pieces were put into yeast, which hooked them together using a natural gene-repair mechanism.
The process was started in late 2002, Dr. Venter said, and undoubtedly cost millions of dollars. That led some scientists to question why someone would want to synthesize an entire organism. Scientists can already make useful organisms — including some that are now starting to be make biofuels — by modifying existing ones using genetic engineering.
