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.
Not that I disagree with your sentiments when it comes to ID proponents (they're morons) but I don't think this really counts as "making life." Not yet, anyway. It's a step in that direction, though.
This ain't rocket surgery.
... 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.
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.
Sony says no Linux on the Cell.
No sig? Sigh...
Lets not get a head of our selves here, they've only re-programmed a cell, not created artificial life. If you are looking for a fully artificial cell you should focus on what's going on in George Church's lab.
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.
Uruk-hai
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.