Slashdot Mirror
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
... the first fully patented life forms. I'm really curious how that would work.... let's say an egg gets a fully artificial set of chromosomes that include patented genes for fixing Thyroid diseases, preventing breast cancer, and purple hair with green skin. Let's also say that that egg develops into a regular person. Is that person property? What happens if they have kids? Do they need to pay royalties?
I can't wait for this stuff, because it will allow for some truly awesome fixes to truly terrible diseases. But I'm also pretty sure that this will result in legal messes of epic proportions. Monsanto will be a side show compared to that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
The genome was produced by machine (from a digital copy of a sequenced genome). Presumably, if somebody wrote a brand new genome, it could be inserted into a living organism by the same procedure.
I guess we can now start finding out which genes are really necessary for an organism to function...
(I am not a biologist.)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
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."
Sony says no Linux on the Cell.
No sig? Sigh...
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.
Uruk-hai
We wish the programmer of the Therac-25 HAD asked himself whatcouldpossiblygowrong.
At the same time, just like with computers, there are many potential benefits to be had. Perhaps more than computers. Of course, computers aren't free to roam the earth, multiply, and then colonize our bodies, so we need to make really sure the right questions are asked.
This particular research was reasonably well thought out and probably couldn't produce anything viable that can't be produced through random mutation anyway. For some of the more advanced work coming up, it should probably be combined with some of the research already done on producing "kill switches", generally creating a dependence on something not available in the wild.
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.
This is funny because I just bought The Windup Girl today, which takes a future Monsanto controlled dystopian future to an extreme. A little depressing, but a good read.
But the funny part is that Monsanto would welcome any sort of biological catastrophe, as they're the only ones that would be capable of fighting it. Kind of like how my paranoid father thinks the majority of viruses are produced by Norton and McCafee on the side just to stir up business, Monsanto could produce a better fungus to drive up business.
Evil, malicious, and a wonton disregard for human suffering, but massively profitable.
Because current machines can only assemble relatively short strings of DNA letters at a time, the researchers inserted the shorter sequences into yeast, whose DNA-repair enzymes linked the strings together. They then transferred the medium-sized strings into E. coli and back into yeast. After three rounds of assembly, the researchers had produced a genome over a million base pairs long.
I read this as:
Sequencer-> Yeast -> E. coli -> Yeast -> Repeat
Short segments-> Merged segment -> ? -> ??? -> Full M. mycoides Genome
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.
1. It would be directed, allowing it to create things that evolution just wouldn't.
2. Nature doesn't have a great track record itself so adding yet more adds more risk. I'm sure all the life that did exist before cyanobacteria evolved and killed everything else buy spewing out toxic oxygen would have prefered a bit less unsupervised genetic twidling...
But don't get me wrong, I think this is great stuff and we should keep on doing it.
Computers and robots can't reproduce without our help. The same criticism (whatcouldpossiblygowrong) would hold when they can.
This article on monsanto.com makes it very plain:
"Monsanto has never developed or commercialized a sterile seed product. Sharing many of the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops. We stand firmly by this commitment. We have no plans or research that would violate this commitment in any way."
In spite of this reassurance, one can't rule out the possibility that Monsanto will decide later that it's in their own best interest to market a sterile seed technology.
Monsanto has persecuted many farmers for allegedly saving the seeds of their GM plants (corn, soybeans, and cotton) for planting. See http://www.monsanto.com/seedpatentprotection/monsantos_position.asp for one of the several Monsanto resources that discusses this practice. There's very little a farmer can do to protect his business when Monsanto makes such an accusation. The legal battles can last years, and are devastating.
I am not learning to program in DNA. That's like the assembly language of the molecular biology world. Could someone come up with a nice ruby module so I can just mixin the traits I want?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?