Quote:
Originally Posted by StephenM
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
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Can you imagine what it would take to produce a completely artificial lifeform from first principles. You'd have to make the amino acids, join them together in base pairs in an artificial DNA, code however many base pairs you needed to create an entire set of genes for the organism, wrap them into chromosomes and then create an entire suite of proteins to make up all the organelles and such for a cell...it would be one hell of a job and something that's a wee bit beyond us for the present. Then you'd have to find some way of giving life to it all, otherwise it'd be just a bag of proteins and nucleic acids wrapped up in funny little structures.
It's like saying what's the difference between a dead cell and a living one....nothing, except one cell is alive, the other isn't. All the chemistry and such is still there in the dead cell, it's just not working. That's what they don't know...what is it that makes it work.