Writing Genetic Code

An anonymous reader writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting on another group of researchers delving into the field of 'synthetic biology.' The project stemming from the efforts of two biology labs in British Columbia and Maryland is attempting to create the first synthetic life form. From the article: 'The project is being spearheaded by U.S. scientist Craig Venter, who gained fame in his former job as head of Celera Genomics, which completed a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000. Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: "We're going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.'" This is certainly not the first group to venture into this territory.

Comments

Problems?

[Renraku]

Just wait until someone writes a piece of code that cures a genetic disease, but must be 'fed' with a certain medication. If not fed with said medication, it will do something real bad.

Building with DNA

[castoridae]

I think one of the biggest challenges isn't in synthesizing strings of DNA, per se - it's in knowing what DNA to synthesize. The real holy grail of synthetic biology is to engineer genetic functions to accomplish a particular goal - design to spec. From the average /. POV, this means "programming" genes in some high-level language (C++ DNA lib, anyone?). Take a look at The Registry of Standard Biological Parts for a first library of genetic "functions".

As I understand it, the current state-of-the-art in terms of programming DNA is basic logic gates that still tend to lose coherence when connected together. Once this is accomplished (best guess, 3-4 years from now to work out the basic science), all of the sophisticated tools and techniques developed by the IT community over the last decade(s) can be rapidly applied, and that goal of design/build to spec will become possible.