Build Your Own Virus

Wire Tap writes "Scientists have assembled the first synthetic virus. The US researchers built the infectious agent from scratch using the genome sequence for polio. The most amusing part is this snippit: 'To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.' Heck, don't we all have our own mail-order suppliers for gene sequences?"

Comments

Not surprising, unfortunately

[h2oliu]

I remember my BioChem classes (10+ years ago), and it seemed even back then that to some degree the technology was already there. It does make you wonder if this is truly the first one, or just the first one to be formally announced.

Huge medicine possibility

[tuxrules]

What if, say, a virus could be designed to destroy cancer cells? What if a virus could be designed to infect parasites? If the drug companies start doing this, it's only a matter of time before they can make viruses that can target disease cells extraordinarily effectively.

Re:Huge medicine possibility

[krmt]

What if, say, a virus could be designed to destroy cancer cells?

Heh. This is exactly what my lab is doing, as are many others. We're using a modified adenovirus to deliver a suicide gene to cancer cells, thereby killing them. Not a new idea anymore at all (people have been working on gene therapy for over a decade) but it's one that takes a lot of time to put in motion. Just do a search on "gene therapy" and "viral vector" at PubMed and you'll get more info than you ever wanted to know about what's going on.

Re:Huge medicine possibility

[Sheetrock]

Viruses have already been employed in gene therapy, and actually this technique was involved in the first gene-therapy death. So, already been done and already wreaked unforseen havoc on at least one occasion, but the idea is that the virus alters the genes in a person's cells in a beneficial manner rather than in a way that causes the cells to churn out more viruses.

Ask Slashdot

[cDarwin]

Question for molecular biologists in slashdot land:

How hard would it be to reduce this to a stepwise procedure that any reasonably intelligent, resourceful, dedicated person could carry out?

Making LSD from scratch required a lot of skill. But with detailed how-tos now widely available, practically anyone can make acid.

It's Hard

[krmt]

This would be a major, major, major pain in the ass to reproduce.

Doing this kind of work takes a lot of time and skill and equipment. It's not particularly hard to get the stuff, but you do need stuff, and the knowledge to go about doing it, and you're not just going to get that knowledge from nowhere.

This team worked for 2 years on this, and they are dedicated scientists with plenty of experience in this sort of work. How long would it take one person working in a home lab to start from scratch? Well over two years. If they don't know anything about Molecular Biology besides what they got out of high school (like your LSD-making example) probably at least triple that.

Everyone is very paranoid about the synthetic virus thing. This is hard work. No, what's more scary is the technology that's been around for three decades or so now, which is the ability to modify existing viruses. Why would someone really go to the trouble to make a new superbug from scratch when they can just use what nature's already done?

Or do you think that you can do a much better job than evolution has over millions of years?

Not that there aren't problems with creating superbugs (even Ebola and HIV have major weaknesses) and it wouldn't be easy, but it'd be far easier to modify something that already exists than it would to build something from scratch.

They *think* they made an exact copy...

[pstav]

But a slight change in the molecular make up of the man made Polio renders this new virus unrecognizable to the antibodies devoloped by the Salk vaccine.

Be very afraid...

Re:Disturbing

[pryan]

Think "12 Monkeys".

Did these guys create "life"?

[VValdo]

There is an ongoing question of whether or not viruses are "alive". Clearly the fragments of DNA used to reconstruct the polio virus aren't, right?

If the "frankensteined" (a good word here) polio virus replicates and acts in other ways like a regular virus...

Did these guys create life from lifelessness?

W

Pure BS - here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

1) "While rare, sporadic case reports of AIDS and sero-archaeological studies have documented human infections with HIV prior to 1970"
http://www.avert.org/his81_86.htm

Why wasn't it identified earlier? It's extremely easy to imagine a situation where hundreds or thousands of Africans were dying of AIDS for decades, though no one knew what they were dying from. It wouldn't have caused a great deal of alarm because deaths would be sporatic (occuring years apart) and deep inside the least medically advanced continent on the planet.

There is even some speculation about deaths as early as 1955 from AIDS, though no one is entirely sure if the "mystery disease" that killed back in 1955 was actually AIDS.

2) AIDS exists in chimpanzee populations, too. It is a different from the strain found in humans.

Smallpox Virus

[xSterbenx]

The funny thing, the sequence for smallpox has been available for quite some time at NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, as are the sequences for at least 2000 viruses and phages (per my last count).

I'm all for public knowledge of such sequences if they lead to productive research in the areas of disease control. However, with the current technology of being able to construct viruses from sequence data, it might be prudent to restrict such data to only respectable research centers.

Re:Tools Still Need Knowledge

[krmt]

You're very right, biology can be more abstracted, up to a point. If someone decided to place a bunch of virulent genes on a single plasmid, or just took one from one of the bacteria that already have them, and simply put a multiple cloning site (a piece of DNA that can be cut in multiple different ways easily) in to it and sold it, there's a real big problem for everyone. Then the person using it isn't much better than a script kiddie, but yes it could certainly be abstracted in that way so that the person wouldn't have to know jack.

But no matter what they'd have to have some basics down, like how to run a gel or transfect bacteria. Not hard stuff, but they'd have to know how to do it. The more and more stuff people build up, like the antibiotic resistance example, the more abstract it can be, just like today you don't have to write to the hardware, you can use something like Perl. They'd still have to learn the equivalent of Perl to do it, which is no small task in itself, but even today there's no need to go around isolating your own restriction enzymes and such.

It is very much an engineering question, just like in software. The more complex your library is, the less you have to worry about. There's a lot of premade stuff out there that can be pieced together already. We're not really at scripting language level, but we're well beyond assembly. Things can be absracted, but only to a point. Like if you want to write your own OS, you can't really do it in Perl (or perhaps bash is a better example there, perl is an organism unto itself ;-), and no matter what you're going to have to get down to some assembly at some time or another. Same thing with this. You can do some very basic things now, like make bacteria turn blue, which many high school biology classes do each year (the technology is over 25 years old!) but to do something as complex as synthesizing polio from scratch requires really knowing nuts and bolts. It's all a question of how much you want to do. Something simple? Doesn't take much knowledge. Something really tough? You'd better really know what you're doing.