Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
I hope that they have inserted specific genes to allow this little bug to be knocked over by our basic antibiotics, or more to the point, have they worked out a way to prevent it picking up resistance genes??
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Hi Lee,
According to a paragraph in the Press Release, the researchers are now mostly
interested in, as they put it "whittling away at the synthetic genome and repeating
transplantation experiments until no more genes can be disrupted and the genome is
as small as possible. This minimal cell will be a platform for analyzing the function
of every essential gene in a cell."
Earlier in the same document they mention, "We can now begin on our ultimate
objective of synthesizing a minimal cell containing only the genes necessary
to sustain life in its simplest form. This will help us better understand how cells
work."
I noted one of the three chosen quotations they embedded in the genome
was by Richard Feynman and it says "What I cannot build, I cannot understand".
This choice of quotation appears to match the stated goals of the researchers.
So in a nutshell, I think rather than adding stuff, the focus currently is in stripping
out as much stuff as possible as long as it keeps on working. That little
minimalist machine would then be the starting point for reverse engineering
how the cells really work. I would then envisage that beyond that a goal would
then be able to code and engineer these things from scratch with the same depth
of understanding as if we had originally created them ourselves.
One might speculate that self-checking repair mechanisms during replication
will be a key focus for many researchers in the future.