SCIENTISTS IN California have created a form of artificial life. They built a species of bacteria from scratch, opening the way for the development of made-to-order designer bugs able to produce fuel or valuable medicines.
The accomplishment brings a whole new meaning to the notion of genetic engineering and offers a startling new view on the meaning of life. “It’s certainly changed my views of the definitions of life and how life works,” said the controversial scientist Craig Venter who led and funded the research.
He and his collaborators built what they are calling a “synthetic cell” by duplicating all the genetic material needed to make a Mycoplasm mycoides bacterium.
When this human-assembled DNA was dropped into another type of bacteria the new genome came to life and started acting just like a real M mycoides bacterium, the researchers report in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science.
The researchers didn’t produce a new type of life with a unique genome, but they did manage to assemble all of the genetic material from scratch and make the artificial bacterium come to life.
“This is the first synthetic cell that has been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer,” said Venter.
The research team also included a few extra genes when constructing their genome just to prove it was their own organism that came to life and not something else. This in itself is profound. It shows they are already able to include extra genes in a synthetic organism almost at will. It means they can look up the structure of genes from any other organism and stitch them into the construct. It could be the gene for producing insulin or some other valuable drug.
The researchers are already planning to redesign algae that can take carbon dioxide and make new kinds of carbon fuels that can be converted to petrol or diesel. They have also begun looking at ways to speed up vaccine production, producing new chemicals, cleaning up pollution and making food ingredients.
“This becomes a very powerful tool for trying to design what we want biology to do,” said Venter.
The work was funded and carried out at the Craig Venter Institute in San Diego. Venter is a controversial figure. He went into direct competition against the international scientists working to produce the first human genome. They wanted the genome to remain free and open to all even as Venter attempted to patent parts of it.
His latest breakthrough was well flagged several years ago when he proclaimed his intention to create a completely new artificial life form.