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Craig Venter 'Creates Life' in Laboratory: Synthia
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by Jordan Yerman | May 20, 2010 at 01:19 pm
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Geneticist Dr. Craig Venter Creates Synthetic Life Form
Dr. Craig Venter and his team of geneticists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have created a synthetic life form by using chemically-created chromosomes in empty cells, causing those cells to multiply. DNA from a simple bacterium was reproduced and slightly modified, and reintroduced to cells stripped of their original DNA.
Nicknamed "Synthia", this artificial single-cell organism is proof-of-concept that cells can be artificially regenerated. While the initial cell was not created from scratch, the replicated Synthia cells were wholly replicated artificially.
Creating synthetic cells will advance pharmaceutical research, particularly with vaccines. The JCVI page linked below also discusses the use of synthetic cells to create biofuels.
"Not Playing God"
Craig Venter and his team make clear that their work is on single-cell microorganisms only, and that this technology does not scale to recreating sentient creatures, as their physiologies are too complex, and still not entirely understood.
The next step is to make the DNA strand as small as possible while still enabling cell replication, thus enabling the researchers to study each gene in greater depth.
The work to create the first synthetic bacterial cell was not easy, and took this team approximately 15 years to complete. Along the way they had to develop new tools and techniques to construct large segments of genetic code, and learn how to transplant genomes to convert one species to another. The 1.08 million base pair synthetic M. mycoides genome is the largest chemically defined structure ever synthesized in the laboratory.
The JCVI's work has been under review by US government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Health, since 2003.
Finally they developed a technique of stripping bacteria cells of all original DNA and substituting it with the new artificial code.
The resulting "synthetic cell" was then "rebooted" and it started to replicate. The ability to reproduce or replicate is considered the basic definition of life.
This new development is all about operating on a large scale. "Reading the genetic code of a wide range of species," the paper says, "has increased exponentially from these early studies. Our ability to rapidly digitize genomic information has increased by more than eight orders of magnitude over the past 25 years." This is a big scaling up in our technological abilities.
Q: Is your work in creating a synthetic bacterial cell “creating life from scratch”?
A: No we do not consider this to be “creating life from scratch” but rather we are creating new life out of already existing life using synthetic DNA to reprogram the cells to form new cells that are specified by the synthetic DNA
(found via boingboing)
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 14:17 on May 20th, 2010
So basically as this could be easily placed into any vaccine,And can be given tasks and commands,Its another way of the government to control and experiment on the humble population of the world,Next thing you know itll be uploading its statistics via 3G to an online serverWe are but nothing but flock for the slaughter!!!
at 15:59 on May 20th, 2010
oh, please - let's not condemn everything before it's had time to be evil. really, people? you and every other ignoramus that's cried 'foul' since the beginning of science. no 'playing god' unless it benefits you personally, no?
at 15:26 on June 3rd, 2010
Insert precise genetic code into stripped cells? Potentially very good news for stem cell treatment, certainly some tough moral questions.
at 01:28 on June 22nd, 2010
Perhaps, the reason for this breakthrough is something more beyond our knowledge who knows if this will be bad or good, definitely this will quite benefit both ends, then we decide which is the lesser evil.