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Synthetic Genome Drives Bacterial Cell
Dr. Eggman writes "Physorg.com brings us news of a synthetic genome, produced by the J. Craig Venter Institute, being used in an existing bacterial cell for the first time. Using a combination of biological hosts, the technique produces short strings of DNA by machine which are then inserted into yeast to be stitched together via DNA-repair enzymes. The medium sequences are passed into E. coli and back into yeast. After three rounds, a genome of three million base pairs was produced." (More below.)
"Specifically, the genome of M. mycoides was synthesized from scratch. This synthetic genome was then inserted into the cells of a bacteria known as Mycoplasm capricolum. The result is a cell, driven by a synthetic genome, producing not the proteins of Mycoplasm capricolum, but of M. mycoides. The institute has far-reaching plans for its synthetic life program, including designing algae that can capture carbon dioxide, make new hydrocarbons for refineries, make new chemicals or food ingredients, and speed up vaccine production."
The BBC has coverage of the hybrid cell as well.
I don't know how many times I've heard the young earth creationists and intelligent designers say that since man can't make life, life must be special. Dear FSM, I wish I could send this article to all those IDiots on all the message boards to which I've posted over the years.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Obvious troll, but I'll bite. How is this any different than the rampant and completely unsupervised genetic twiddling that has been happening in nature for the last few billion years?
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
sudo dd if=genome.helix of=/dev/nucleus0
Shall we ask Monsanto?
2^3 * 31 * 647
This sounds exactly like Jurassic Park, except replace Dinosaurs with Yeast and Frogs with E. Coli.
Need I explain what happens next?
FTFA
Perhaps there is a difference between random changes directed solely to furthering of DNA propagation ...
and the short term goals of greedy men?
whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Beer that gives you the shits?
Oh wait, that's already been invented.
Pandora's box has been opened. I'm excited to see what pours out over the next decades.
Uh, I think you need to read up on your Greek mythology a bit more. Opening Pandora's Box was not such a good thing.
This ain't rocket surgery.
legal messes of epic proportions
Only in America.
Though it will spawn the new industry of genetic engineering tourism.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
People use to say the same thing about computers... and still do about robots. The question a rational person asks is "what is the risk vs possible return."
Not to be the party pooper here, but I do doubt this will get expanded to humans. Messing with Human DNA would take massive amounts of experimentation (since we don't really know squat about how it works, when you compare what we do know to what we don't know), with massive amounts of harmful effects (and deaths) on said test subjects. Without even debating the ethics of it here, I highly doubt that such experimentation would be welcomed by society.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
Damn straight - we need these bio-engineered life forms to protect us from the robots when they finally make their move...
That's what you meant by risk vs. return right?
I guess we should wait until the actual Science article comes out, but it looks like they basically synthesized an entire bacterial genome, as opposed to the normal way of having a bacteria copy it's own genome with it's own enzymes, and then they put it into a different bacterial strain.
Is that "making" a cell artificially? They didn't make most of the bacterial cell themselves, the bacteria did that. They didn't design the genome from scratch, they just copied an existing one that nature made and modified it a bit. I'm not sure that constitutes actually making a cell artificially. If you buy a mac at a store, print out the ones and zeros to make windows vista, manually retype them, make a boot disk, and install that on the mac and it worked, that would be an impressive feat, sure, but did you "make a completely new computer?" (Best comparison I could come up with, sorry about that in advance). I don't think this can be considered making life yet.
Second, is this "life?" Life seems to be impossible to define, but it's pretty certain that "genome was stitched together in a lab and inserted into a dummy cell" is unique to this thing, nothing else we'd call life has that feature. Does that disqualify it as life and make it something else?
To their credit, Venter doesn't seem to be claiming they made new life, but they are aiming for that eventually, and I'm curious as to what slashdot thinks about when we can actually say we've created artificial life.
The question a rational person asks is "what is the risk vs possible return."
The typical American asks "What is the possible return" and ignores the risk in pursuit of personal gain.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Or maybe he was being so subtly ironic that I missed the point entirely.
This ain't rocket surgery.
It can be done, and that means it will be done. The first applications will be medical; synthetic gene therapy could offer cures for many diseases we currently have no way to treat, and only "it's bad 'cause it's got DNA in it!!!" Luddites will object. Yes, there will be harmful side effects, including death, but people with terminal cancer, or parents of children with terrible birth defects, will be willing to take the risk. Once the therapeutic principles are established, we'll inevitably see more frivolous applications. And at that point, whether or not it's "welcomed by society" will be irrelevant -- as long as there are people with the money to pay for it, someone will do it.
That being said, we're a long way from that point. There's a hell of a lot of difference between building a bacterial genome and modifying a human one at will.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's different for a a lot of reasons. I'll just focus on three. The bio-weapon fear: the viruses and bacteria that we harbor have co-evolved with us. Viruses and bacteria shape evolution in a myriad of subtle ways but one way to look at even the most pathogenic forms is that their habitat is you and me. So despite the suffering inflicted by TB, Ebola, HIV etc. fundamentally it is not in the best interest of the microbe to cause the extinction of its habitat -- although it probably happens. The bio-weapon fear is that pathogens can now be created whose long term interest is not in the "cruel but fair" hands of Darwinian Evolution but in the possibly malevolent (or hopefully beneficent) hands of a bona-fide "CREATOR/DESTROYER". Let's hope Venter is nice. The second: the lateral gene transfer mechanism has been shown to play a role on evolution. However now it is possible to accelerate this "artificial sex" to rates that far exceed the norm. Plant-Animal hybrids here we come -- and let's use our imagination. Plant a seed, up grows the plant, a flower fruits, a butterfly emerges which lays -- seeds. Pretty kewl huh. Three: Genetic twiddling -- there are some parts of the cell that evolution just doesn't take a chance in messing around with. It is now possible to mess around.
My two cents: weeds win...the reason algae for fuel doesn't work is weeds. If you go to Indiana you don't see the Monsanto soybeans growing wild in a ditch. And there are no wild packs of Shih Tzus. I'm not sharpening the pitchfork yet.
Oh come on, the likely hood of an oil spill in the gulf is 1/10,000. Do we really want to block drilling based on the 1/10,000 chance of a 200 million barrel leak that could kill all life in the gulf and do substantial damage to most of the eastern seaboard and destroy the fishing industry in four states and potentially do a lot of damage to the atlantic ocean and carribean as well? Be reasonable.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The typical American asks "What is the possible return" and ignores the risk in pursuit of personal gain.
Given the amount of Luddism that is invariably displayed with respect to genetic engineering, I'd say that in this particular case the reverse is true. There's a level of ignorance driven fear on this topic that I haven't seen since the days when a lot of people genuinely believed that computers were malevolent "thinking machines" that would try to take the world away from their human creators.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Dude, that's what secret labs are for. Haven't you ever seen the mad scientists trope?
The natural algae already do this. Even more, they produce oxygen at the same time!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And science is only ever an approximation to the truth, it doesn't try to be anything else (though people try to make it more than it is).
The only people who try to make science into more than it is are religious people. Scientists are keenly aware of the approximations in their search for truth.
BTW, how nice of your God to keep moving the goal posts. It used to be: you can't create life out of dirt. Now you have to create dirt, too? And I presume that the goal posts will keep moving until they arrive at "Use your own space/time continuum."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.