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So we have created life.  Well according to Daniel Gibson and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute anyway.  Its an impressive feat inserting a synthetic genome into an empty cell but to me it doesn’t seem a million miles away from creating Dolly the sheep (original article found here), which in itself was fascinating.  The difference between the two experiments is that in “Synthia” there is no biological parent involved, classification of the cell the genome was inserted into aside.

To me the true novel value is being able to make wholesale changes to a genome via a computer programme and synthesise it.  That alone will revolutionise biology.  No more long winded insertion processes just to express a single gene!  Just find your sequence, insert it into a data file on a computer, synthesise it and whack it in a cell to grow masses of colonies.  Easy peasy, although that is obviously a simplified pathway of how things work.  However whilst the ideal may be to introduce new pathways into certain bacterial to aid oil clean up or for creating proteins used for medical purposes it is still in the realms of science fiction for now.  This is mostly because we don’t know enough about the pathways themselves to allow efficient genomic transplantation, however it could be argued that by doing going ahead with transplantations anyway new and exciting discoveries are bound to be made.

This has been a remarkable proof of principle experiment but the next step is to determine what the minimal genome a cell needs to survive.  Synthetic biology will make this easier and will lead to the overall goal of  generating a cell de novo without using genome transplantation.  But then are we running the risk of truly playing God?

Original article – Gibson et al 2010 Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome

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Image by Patrick Hoesly @ www.zooboing.com

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