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First Successful Genome Transplant In Bacteria
eldavojohn writes "Researchers reported the first genome transplant from one bacterium to another, thereby transforming the species from M. mycoides to M. capricolum. The research, published in Science, shows that it is possible to achieve a success rate of 1 in 150,000 genome transplants in bacteria. While this may not seem like very good odds, it's actually a major step towards synthetic life, opening up the possibility of tailoring bacteria to our needs. The article mentions medical uses and fuel production as possible applications."
Well, I, for one, welcome our new, tailored, microscopic overlords.
While this work is a good step forward toward the ability to insert completely synthetic genomes into living cells, there are some questions left unanswered by the paper that demand answers before the technique can be widely adopted. First, the authors only speculate freely on how the mycoides genome made it into the capricolum cells. It's believed that perhaps two capricolum cells fuse around a mycoides genome, but no evidence to support this claim is given in the paper. Second, the authors do only a single PCR of a single gene to look for the presence of capricolum DNA in the supposed 'new' mycoides cells. This is not nearly enough testing, in my opinion, especially compared to the extensive testing they did on the cells in order to prove the mycoides DNA was present, in it's original genomic form, without insertions.
Until we know how the DNA got there and where the original DNA went, the technique will remain a laboratory curiosity and not something, for example, that can be used in any sort of medical fashion. Still, the paper is fascinating and raises some interesting philosophical questions about what constitutes the information belonging to a species.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Anyone else read this as "First Sucessful Gnome Transplant in Bacteria"? I mean I know they little guys are smart and useful, but that's not reason to be sending them to do the job of nanites :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Since this life can be synthetic, there's nothing in nature that is a natural antibiotic. So if there less benign aspects of the new bacteria, and it gets loose in the wild, it has potential to severely damage the ecosystem. Better to plan for the worse case scenario, but hope for the best.
[singsong]
one of these 150,000 things is not like the others..
while they both would kill goats if they had their 'drothers...
one of these is different, can't you see...
without a cell wall it should be easy...
[/singsong]
I'd like to take this portion of the post to apologize...
"Ignorance breeds fear" Dept.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They were merely replacing KDE.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What are they talking about? I successfuly transplanted one of my Gnomes from the side garden to the front garden just last week. I even have pictures to prove it! How can they claim to be the first?
Error:
gb2/kuro5hin
They should start with a stupider person, where a slight increase would be much more obvious. Bush earned a Masters in a fairly tough college. Try it out on Algore first, who flunked out of two colleges.
Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat by Zonk, which refers to Last Updated: Thursday, 28 June 2007 at BBC which refers to pretty much the same paper.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This means they're one step closer to creating Dark Angel, which I think we can all agree, is vastly more important. :)
I for one welcome our new formerly-M.-mycoides-but-now-M.-capricolum overlords.
Please... everyone knows 20th century colleges were basically expensive daycare centers.
Gray Goo! Gray Goo! Gray Goo!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Gray goo is a blob made of self-replicating nanomachines. Green goo is the biological version.
The problem with this news article is that most people hearing about it and commenting on it are clueless with respect to what it means and doesn't mean.
It means that someone walked into your house took all the old furniture out and replaced it with a whole bunch of different but similar furniture so that when you got home in the evening you could still sit down on the couch and watch TV.
So what everyone is going gaga over is the fact that the movers can take furniture out and replace it with different furniture. To be honest, I'm not that impressed. It has *nothing* to do with synthetic life, artificial life, etc. because they are *still* using the few hundred enzymes that nature had to evolve over billions of years. They didn't sit down and design a totally new basis for self-replicating systems that can survive in our "real" world and make a copy of itself. The hard drive in your computer is significantly more impressive. It has more parts and using a single command I can get it to copy itself. And *we* humans had to design every single circuit and craft every single part in it. Now *thats* something to be impressed with.
And then the citation:
Abstract: But would it be too painful to actually add in relevant information from the published article? Not all of us know where to go get "Science", nor do we have magical access. Slashdot editors, if you would be so kind- stop accepting articles about papers behind paywalls. Some of us want to actually discuss the contents of these articles, the research methods, to look into what's actually going on
Anyway, genome transplantation means that maybe we can get the genome of our stem cells transplanted into bacteria. Just store lots of stem cell DNA, and then one day start the procedure to make the bacteria uptake the DNA and--- well, the current problem with this is that the human genome is much different from bacterial genomes, and so there will undoubtedly be way too many problems with the host bacteria, i.e. trying to make some of the proteins and biomolecules that actually causes self-destruction, but the concept/hope is still there.
BTW, the group that this article is about has been taking up way too much of our collective attention:
* Team claims synthetic life feat
* Venter Institute claims patent on synthetic life
* and now this.
And I should probably link over to this site.
"The scientists want to synthesize this genome, called Mycoplasma genitalium, using only simple chemicals." Did anyone else go "WTF!?!?" when they mentioned this name? Hmm.. although transplanting a naturally found genome to another similar bacterial cell doesn't seem like much, this actually means that once they're able to synthesize a minimum genetic sequence for basic cell function, like the one named above, they'll have a good chance of injecting the new genome into them and thus they will have just about total control over the cell's functions.
One way or another :-)
Would this be like one of those "mind transplant machines" then?
Thank you. I was about to post the same thing.
I think we need to step away from our screens for a while.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
There ya go picking on him again. It's not nice to ridicule the handicapped.
And I don't condone any sort of violence. I guess that was Pat Robertsons job.
Some may feel the "no child left behind" education policy didn't work.
But speaking of behinds and education, some would give the current administration credit for helping to resolve to old question:
Why does "assassination" have two "ass"es in it???
Nature has been much, much more successful than any rational design to create antibiotic resistance. All that stuff about abuse of antibiotics, like taking them for viruses, stopping part way through or stupid uses like for cattle feed to promote growth, creates antibiotic resistance incredibly rapidly. And bacteria share these genes across species very frequently, making it especially dangerous. As for the artificial life, it turns out that nature has already very finely tuned bacteria for their jobs. Artificial genes interfere, in fact keeping the genes we want around tends to be the real difficulty because they are so detrimental evolutionarily.
Great, so we have confirmed the first steps to bio-war through mutating germs...or we can hope that people actually use it for good intent. Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This stuff does honestly scare me. The optimist in me realizes the benefits we can cultivate. The realist in me knows that this could honestly be far worse than a nuclear bomb.
...opening up the possibility of tailoring bacteria to our needs.some bacteria to wash my dishes and pick up my stuff.
Hope is the currency of fools
And some /.ers prove how simple complex life can be.
OK, now the viral marketing for Bioshock has officially gone too far...
The authors agreed that a single PCR wasnt enough, so they went with a hindIII digestion and an agarose gel run, to make sure that the pieces were all the right size, and nopt some funky recombination. They also managed a few southern blots to further ensure their results. AND they did 1300 Random Sequences (with luck a sequence can be read to 1000ish base pairs..), and IT ALL MATCHED.... 1.09 million base pairs all fit right...
So my point is that they did the work, made sure it was bulletproof, got accepted into a major journal. And sure they dont know the whole story of whats going on, but it doesnt matter, they DID IT, a full Genome transplant, with proper methods used to ensure its validity..
Storm
So, you're saying that Al Gore flunked out of daycare?
Am I the only one, that when I hear these things, thinks "Mutation" ? I can just see "We made a new bacteria to help us!" ... a few years later, "Oh no, the bacteria mutated and now it's going to wipe out 98% of the world's population!"
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti