Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life


By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: January 24, 2008

Taking a significant step toward the creation of man-made forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.

Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome (Science Express)While scientists had previously synthesized the complete DNA of viruses, this is the first time it has been done for bacteria, which are much more complex. The genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized.

The feat is a watershed for the emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves the design of organisms to perform particular tasks, such as making biofuels. Synthetic biologists envision being able one day to design an organism on a computer, press the "print" button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

"What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future," said Dr. J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist. He assembled the team that made the bacterial genome as part of his well publicized quest to create the first synthetic organism. The work was published online Thursday by the journal Science.