Simplest Living Organism Created

[SolarpunkFan]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/craig- ... laboratory

If synthetic biology has a rockstar, it’s Craig Venter, and he’s back with a new hit. Venter and his team say they’ve created one of the simplest organisms theoretically possible using a combination of genetic engineering techniques, in-lab DNA-synthesis, and trial-and-error.

The work, published Thursday in Science, describes a self-replicating bacterium invented by Venter and his team that contains just 437 genes, a “genome smaller than that of any autonomously replicating cell found in nature,” according to the paper. The work sheds light on the function of the individual genes necessary to have life, and it also shows us just how little we actually know about specific gene functions.

“We have long been interested in simplifying the genomic software of a bacterial cell by eliminating genes that are nonessential for cell growth under ideal conditions in the laboratory,” Venter wrote in the paper. “This facilitates the goal of achieving an understanding of the molecular and biological function of every gene that is essential for life.”

What do you all think? A good step forward for synthetic biology?

[Ziggy Stardust]

It is a good step forward, but not a massive step: IIRC the smallest genome found in nature is Mycoplasma genitalum with around 475 genes. And, in fact, it seems that this genome was essentially just a modified version of a Mycoplasma genome (to be more precise, this newest genome is the third "version" of a series of synthesized genomes, the first of which was just a synthesized copy of a Mycoplasma genome) as opposed to something built "from scratch". In essence, it's not like these scientists just searched through all the possible genes in existence and found the barest few essential to life and through them together. What they've done is essentially created a super streamlined version of an existing organism; which is still critically important (in the press release they note that only around ~150 of the genes have known functions, so we can learn a lot from this), but is a far cry from the ability to create completely artificial life.

(There's also the hairier question of whether or not what they created actually is a living organism. There's a lot of debate over these synthetic bacteria, and it is by no means a strict consensus that they even are living organisms, due to the vagaries inherent in trying to rigorously define such a term.)