Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
You're right, Doug. It's not life from first principles, so to speak. But it's a long way down the road towards that.
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That's right Carl. The key point here is that its a synthetic genome, rather than "synthetic life". The success here relects both our understanding of bacterial genomes, and also the revolution that has taken place in DNA synthesis (and sequencing) technologies in the last few years. The cost of synthesizing genes has now reached a point where, for many applications, it is cheaper and faster to get your gene of interest synthesized rather than cloning it yourself. We have completely redesigned and ordered quite a few synthetic genes in my lab in the last 18 months, at less than $800 per gene! But this demonstration is gene synthesis on a whole new scale!
Interestingly when they first introduced this synthetic genome it failed to replicate, and in just 3 months they were able to identify a single nucleotide error that prevented replication!
This report is definately a significant event in the history of biology and biotechnology.
Cheers,
Stephen