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InvisibleLe_Canard
The Duk Abides


Registered: 05/16/03
Posts: 94,392
Loc: Earthfarm 1 Flag
Scientists Build First Man-Made Genome; Synthetic Life Comes Next
    #7924434 - 01/24/08 02:27 PM (16 years, 8 days ago)

Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.

The researchers used yeast to stitch together four long strands of DNA into the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. They said it's more than an order of magnitude longer than any previous synthetic DNA creation. Leading synthetic biologists said with the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science, the first synthetic life could be just months away -- if it hasn't been created already.

"We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism," said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. "What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell."

With the new ability to sequence a genome, scientists can begin to custom-design organisms, essentially creating biological robots that can produce from scratch chemicals humans can use. Biofuels like ethanol, for example.

"The J. Craig Venter Institute will be able to take a file stored on a computer and using synthetic chemistry, turn that information into life," said Chris Voigt, a University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist. "I would be shocked if it doesn't come out in six months. I think they've done it."

The technique is basically a reverse of the Human Genome Project, which translated DNA into the letters A, C, T and G, which represent the body's building blocks: the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Synthetic biologists' ambitious goal is to arrange those letters to create never-before-seen organisms that will do their bidding.

The first phase of Venter's three-step process, which he published last year, involved transplanting and "booting up" the genome of one species of bacterium into another. The remaining step is to combine the first two steps, then insert the new synthetic genome into a standard bacterium. Scientists said they expect the announcement of man-made life this year.


(Wired)


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OfflinePhanTomCat
Teh Cat....
Male User Gallery


Registered: 09/07/04
Posts: 5,908
Loc: My Youniverse....
Last seen: 14 years, 11 months
Re: Scientists Build First Man-Made Genome; Synthetic Life Comes Next [Re: Le_Canard]
    #7924937 - 01/24/08 04:12 PM (16 years, 8 days ago)

Neat article....! The implications are pretty grand....
Kinda~ scary, kinda~ not....

Quote:

The Article said:
Scientists said they expect the announcement of man-made life this year.




It isn't truly "man made life" until we can create the WHOLE thing from scratch - cell, DNA, and all....
Mixing and modifying something that is already there is easier than starting from scratch - especially with the complexity of life....


>^;;^<


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I'll be your midnight French Fry....  :naughty:

"The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...."

>^;;^<


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Invisibleelbisivni

Registered: 10/01/06
Posts: 2,839
Re: Scientists Build First Man-Made Genome; Synthetic Life Comes Next [Re: Le_Canard]
    #7927450 - 01/24/08 11:09 PM (16 years, 8 days ago)

Good article, featured on BBC Science/Nature today..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7203186.stm


-----


An important step has been taken in the quest to create a synthetic lifeform.

A US team reports in Science magazine how it replicated the entire DNA code from a common bacterium in the laboratory.

The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Publication of the research gives others the chance to scrutinise it. Some have ethical concerns.

These critics have been calling for several years now for a debate on the risks of creating "artificial life" in a test tube.

But Dr Hamilton Smith, who was part of the Science study, said the team regarded its lab-made genome - a laboratory copy of the DNA used by the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium - as a step towards synthetic, rather than artificial, life.

He told BBC News: "We like to distinguish synthetic life from artificial life.

"With synthetic life, we're re-designing the cell chromosomes; we're not creating a whole new artificial life system."


Gene cassettes

The team of 17 scientists constructed the bacterial genome by chemically synthesising small blocks of DNA.

These were grown up in a bacterium, and knitted together into bigger pieces, so-called "cassettes" of genes.

The researchers ended up with several large chunks of DNA that were joined to make the circular genome of a synthetic version of Mycoplasma genitalium.

They have named it Mycoplasma JCVI-1.0, after their research centre, the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD, US.

Dr Craig Venter, who was involved in the race to decode the human genome, believes tailor-made micro-organisms can become efficient producers of non-polluting fuels such as hydrogen. Other synthetic bacteria could be made to take up greenhouse gases, he believes.

"It sets the stage for what we hope is going to be a new approach to engineering organisms," said co-researcher Dr Smith.


Operating systems

To achieve this goal, the researchers must overcome a crucial, and tricky, obstacle.

They must transplant the synthetic genome into another cell so that it can use the existing machinery to "boot up" and start growing and reproducing.

"It's installing the software - basically we have to boot up the genome, get it operating," said Dr Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978.

"We're simply re-writing the operating software for cells - we're not designing a genome from the bottom up - you can't drop a genome into a test tube and expect it to come to life," he added.

This is the stage which raises the most concern among critics, and where a new lifeform could be said to be truly created. How precisely will it behave? What will its impact be on other organisms and the environment? Some say it is a step too far, but others argue that the new field of synthetic biology is an important science.


Even bigger

The UK's Royal Society is seeking views from the public on the issue.

Adviser on synthetic biology, Dr Jason Chin, said the increasing ability to design and construct DNA sequences would, in principle, allow the construction of organisms for particular purposes, such as biofuels production.

He added: "Understanding how you construct organisms artificially is an important first step. But scientists still need to understand what effect altering the DNA sequence of an organism - such as bacteria - will have upon their behaviour."

Dr Drew Endy of the Department of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, said that re-constructing a natural bacterial genome from scratch was a great technical feat.

He said genomes 10 times larger than Mycoplasma JCVI-1.0 had already been assembled from existing DNA fragments by a Japanese group.

Dr Endy added: "Given the work already done in Japan, building genomes almost 10 million base-pairs long - I would be surprised if by 2012 it were not technically possible to routinely design and construct the genomes of any bacteria or single celled eukaryote, which also means that it will be possible to construct some mammalian chromosomes."

Dr Simon Woods, a bio-ethicist at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre at the University of Newcastle, UK, said scientists were acting in a regulatory vacuum.

"On the one hand it's an amazing piece of science but the real concern is that it's another example of science delving into matters that have potentially dangerous consequences," he said.

"It's not necessarily going to stay in the hands of well-intentioned scientists."


-----


We're starting to play God! I wonder what's next?


--------------------
From dust you are made and to dust you shall return.


Edited by elbisivni (01/24/08 11:10 PM)


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OfflineSeussA
Error: divide byzero


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 2 months, 20 days
Re: Scientists Build First Man-Made Genome; Synthetic Life Comes Next [Re: elbisivni]
    #7928486 - 01/25/08 04:42 AM (16 years, 7 days ago)

When I first read this the other day I was kind of excited, but after digging into it, turns out that I'm not so impressed. They are not creating life from non-life, which is how the article is presented. All they are doing is taking an existing organism and building the DNA of that organism from the ground up, using other existing organisms as construction tools. They then insert their "man made copy" genome into an existing cell to see if it works or not. I guess it is a step, but the article really made it sound like they were creating life, which is nowhere near what they are doing.


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Just another spore in the wind.


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