14 thoughts on ““It’s Tough To Draw Where The Line Is””

  1. The really interesting part will come when they start making synthetic life with different building blocks. A first step might be to try mirror image stereoisomers of all the standard biochemicals. Beyond that, they could try modifying the genetic code and adding new amino acids. Ultimately, it would be cool to design a new genetic coding system with much better error detection/correction (say, triply redundant encoding), to make organisms much more resistant to somatic mutation and aging.

  2. The scientists also encoded an email address and the name of a website, so that anyone who successfully deciphered the quotations hidden in the genome could notify the scientists.

    Do aliens have an internet? We might check our own DNA to see if they left us a calling card???

    Signing the cell also means knowing who to sue when some unintended damage occurs.

    They want to add amino acids to the twenty that all life is based on? Could they intermix with other bacteria and what might be the result?

    Biological computers and starships just around the corner?

  3. It sounds like they completely replaced the genome of a cell with one that had been sequenced artificially. That’s pretty amazing, but it’s a long way from designing a genome from the ground up. Just because they synthesized it doesn’t mean they actually understand how it all works. No doubt most of the functional machinery of the cell was borrowed from the genomes of similar species. But it perhaps it will allow them to study how things work by mixing and matching genes from different sources.

  4. Bill, the genome in question is the minimal genome they design in an earlier paper. Venter has been on this vendetta to create an “operating system” for microorganisms for decades now and its not completely clear why that’s necessary for the goals they always mention: biodiesel production, co2 sequestration, whatever the hip investors wanna hear.

    I think his true motivation is to create an organism that is completely understood, then study it to observe interesting behaviors and confirm that an explanation can be given for how that behavior occurred. Once you have that baseline you can introduce any gene you’d like to know the function for and observe the changes.. work that into your theory.. black-box reverse engineering from a solid foundation.

  6. This is pure showmanship. They just synthesized a known genome, from another organism, instead of harvesting it naturally, then inserted it into the host cell. In no sense whatseover did they design the genome.

    It’s more or less like running a chemical reaction that produces water and claiming you’ve synthesized “artificial” water.

  7. Carl, actually no. The genome in this work is pared down from a natural organism. Now, you might say that the individual genes are natural designs and even the particular selection of genes to go in the artificial genome is cribbed from nature, but the real breakthrough here is that they’ve managed to synthesis a DNA strand long enough to contain an entire genome – that’s never been done before – and transplant it into another cell – that has been done before, but with a natural genome, by them, last year.

    It’s a stepwise progression and it’s not Venter’s fault that the media has such a terrible memory or understanding of scientific progress. Next year they’ll announce they’ve built a genome that includes genes to perform a specific engineered function and the media will report everything that they have today as being new and totally gloss over the truly novel progress.

  8. Sorry, I don’t agree, Trent. Not only are the genes the same — all the complex regulatory apparatus — the embedded promoters, sites for transcription control proteins to bind, et cetera and so forth — is the same, too. They didn’t design a damn thing, except that they added some stuff (their initials) for fun in regions they knew weren’t directly coding for anything.

    Yes, it’s an accomplishment to stitch such very long sequences of synthesized DNA together, and insert it into a cell. It’s worth publishing. But it’s not nearly a breakthrough. I don’t even think it’s that interesting. Who the heck wants to transplant an entire genome into an organism? That’s nuts. What you want is to (1) understand in detail the transcriptional control, so you can turn genes on and off at will, and (2) be able to insert genes of your own design and control their expression. Nothing here helps with that.

    It’s interesting science, but from my point of view fairly sterile. It’s like when IBM wrote “IBM” in single atoms with an AFM on a piece of silicon. Cool, yes. Genuine serious technological advance? Nope.

    Listen, nobody has even ever designed a single gene, coding for a single protein of biological significance, from scratch. When Venter does that, we’ll be on the road, or rather on the on-ramp of the road, to some kind of genuine “designer” life.

  9. Ok, you’re somewhat right and you’re somewhat wrong. Where you’re right: this is “just” a technique for constructing a 582,970 bp DNA strand. That’s a significant but somewhat boring and technical achievement. I can see why you might not care.

    The technique for transplanting a genome is valuable because it means you can create a culture of bacteria that have only the genes that you have written in the genome. As such, the previous work Venter has done in creating a minimalist genome (which includes all the stuff you say you want) can now be used to accurately determine whether they are sufficient for life, and to answer other important questions. For example, we still don’t know whether or not the order of genes in a bacterial genome is important or not.. and if they are, why. And as a well understood base for engineering bacteria to perform a specific task.. using a wild-type bacteria doesn’t give you the same level of control.

    In regards to creating custom genes, that’s been done dozens of times. In regards to controlling their expression, high school students do that every year.

  10. The DNA strand, while clearly vitally important, does not contain all the information required to create a replicating cell. The cytosome turns out to have a lot of important stuff. If you take a frog egg and replace its DNA with that from another organism, it starts to divide, acting like an embryonic frog–not the other organism. It doesn’t become a frog or the other organism. The centrosome, for example, does some very interesting stuff and, while a cell can divide without it, it has something to do with the development of more complex organisms. We can’t simply say that all the other machinery in a cell outside the nucleus is somehow negligible.

  12. But, what it does show is that life is pretty simple to create, and arose purely by chance from ordinary primordial muck after a chance encounter between ordinary highly refined molecules which got zapped by lightning and started, perfectly ordinarily, to replicate their patterns and extend their functionality into perfectly ordinary complex, er, functions. Right?

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