Scientists build 1st man-made genome. Synthetic life months away

http://www.wired.com/science/discove...nthetic_genome

Synthetic life is just months away from realization. The possibilities this creates with computing, medicine, and countless other fields is phenomenal. You will be hearing a lot more about this in the future.

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.

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Wow, this and nanotechnology sure seem to be very amazing technology.

I was chatting with my mother about this, and she chimed in with her typical skepticism:

I am always wary of science which is published in newspapers. I am also
wary of self-promoting scientists who run to the media with news
conferences of how great their find is.

The technology of utilizing present day bacteria to make specific
proteins is already present. We do not need to create an organism from
scratch to do so.

Although they have a sequence they have strung together, I will be
interested to see if the organism survives and replicates once they
remove the DNA from a cell and add their created DNA sequence. I am not
a geneticist but I am aware of control mechanisms involving proteins and
influences of control genes on structural genes: stuff that's called
epigenetics. How much of this is integral to the action of the bacterial
genome will become evident.

Your mum is pretty much right.

Despite this (possibly due to my unflinching optimism), aside from godawful tabloid science I think that the science published in Newspapers, while not as accurate as that published elsewhere is fairly indicative of where current interests lie in scientific fields and, as this area is potentially an insanely useful one I still greet this as good news.

Strictly speaking it's not artificial life, since they're just replacing the DNA of an organism with a new code. No doubt it's an important step forward in genetic engineering, but we're still a long ways away from creating life from scratch.

True "artificial life" will be the construction of a living organism from entirely nonliving components. Not only will that open door to remarkable practical applications, but it will finally settle the abiogenesis question that's been haunting biologists (and philosophers) for the last five thousand years.