Life Made to Order

Roland Piquepaille writes "When he was president of Celera Genomics, Craig Venter was the leader of the private project which deciphered the human genome. Now, he has another goal: create custom-made organisms -- one DNA letter at a time. 'Venter's objective is not merely to tweak existing life forms by inserting genes that confer specific traits -- the main tactic in conventional genetic engineering. Instead he wants to assemble an entire genome, DNA letter by DNA letter, putting together only the genes he wants: those necessary for an organism's survival and those that will allow it to carry out a desired task.' If successful, maybe in a decade, this could yield new sources of energy or novel drugs. Venter is not alone in this quest. Other institutions, private companies or universities, have similar efforts under development. Check this column for a summary of this eye-opening -- but quite long -- Technology Review article."

Comments

The real story is tech progress, not Venter...

[LinuxParanoid]

I read the full Technology Review article.

Craig Venter is propounding the vision. But the real science/engineering described in that article seems to be the following:

In mid-2002, researchers at SUNY-Stony Brook synthesized a 7,500-letter long Polio DNA sequence, converted it to RNA, then "combined that RNA with enzymes and other molecules in a test tube, and watched as whole polio viruses assembled spontaneously."

The complicated chemical steps used to synthesize the DNA are error-prone; errors grow linearly with the number of steps "so researchers typically limit fragments to fewer than 80 letters."

The Stony-brook researchers thus took two years.

A company called Egea Biosciences has a prototype machine, the device makes a mistake only once for every 10,000 DNA letters, or bases, a 100-fold improvement over conventional techniques that typically have an error rate of one in 100.

The CEO of that company "says the technology could be extended to yield in a matter of weeks highly accurate strands 100,000 bases in length--long enough to make a very simple bacterial genome."

That's what I got out of the article. And a recognition that there is a loose analogy to semiconductor manufacturing in there. The Venter name is useful mostly for hype as far as I can tell. Actually, setting a vision is really important so I should cut him some slack, but I more appreciated the tech details above which were buried in the middle of the article.

--LP

There is more than nucleic acids...

[ubiquitin]

...involved in the creation of a living thing. An astonishing array of proteins, complex sugars, and lipids are all necessary for even a unicellular organisms to be viable. These aren't as easily assembled as nucleic acids, but they are just as requisite. The public focus inevitably tends toward DNA and RNA, especially by marketers such as Craig Venter, and especially when the story is being told to a non-scientific readership. The real story in biology is always more complex than the headlines would have us believe. Why can't these people make a real contribution to the world of medicine and figure out how SARS works.