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Scientists Announce Plans For Synthetic Human Genomes (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the playing-God dept.

An anonymous reader writes: After it was reported three weeks ago that scientists have held a secret meeting to consider creating a synthetic human genome, the participants of that meeting have officially published their plans. They announced a plan to launch a project that would radically reduce the cost of synthesizing human genomes -- a revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation. The Washington Post reports: "The announcement, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period. The promoters of synthetic genomes envision a project that would eventually be on the same scale as the Human Genome Project of the 1990s, which led to the sequencing of the first human genomes. The difference this time would be that, instead of 'reading' genetic codes, which is what sequencing does, the scientists would be 'writing' them. They have dubbed this the 'Genome Project-write.'"

3 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. They're trying to patent "human" genes by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This looks like an end run around patent law, to create "synthetic" genes that are patentable even if they're functionally identical to existing "natural" gene sequences.

    1. Re:They're trying to patent "human" genes by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except that it's not that simple (biology never is). Yes, multiple codons may code for a single amino acid, but they may yield different expression levels or transcription rates. In the genetic manipulation world, "codon optimization" is already a thing.

  2. "The same scale" as genome analysis? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hmm. Every genome-analysis technique in existence has a substantial read-error rate, and overcomes those errors by reading lots of strands and doing lots of statistics. It seems like a very, very large leap from "analyze a billion DNA strands to come up with a single sequence that's accurate enough" to "produce a billion specified DNA strands that are each accurate enough".