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First Successful Genome Transplant In Bacteria
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:48 AM
from the was-me-now-i'm-you dept.
from the was-me-now-i'm-you dept.
eldavojohn writes "Researchers reported the first genome transplant from one bacterium to another, thereby transforming the species from M. mycoides to M. capricolum. The research, published in Science, shows that it is possible to achieve a success rate of 1 in 150,000 genome transplants in bacteria. While this may not seem like very good odds, it's actually a major step towards synthetic life, opening up the possibility of tailoring bacteria to our needs. The article mentions medical uses and fuel production as possible applications."
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One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's 224 comments
slyyy writes "The Universtiy of Rochester has discovered the complete genome of a bacterial parasite inside the genome of the host species. This opens the possibility of exchanging DNA between unrelated species and changing our understanding of the evolutionary process. From the article: 'Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms. Bacterial DNA is very conspicuous in its structure, so if scientists sequencing a nematode genome, for example, come across bacterial DNA, they would likely discard it, reasonably assuming that it was merely contamination--perhaps a bit of bacteria in the gut of the animal, or on its skin. But those genes may not be contamination. They may very well be in the host's own genome. This is exactly what happened with the original sequencing of the genome of the anannassae fruitfly--the huge Wolbachia insert was discarded from the final assembly, despite the fact that it is part of the fly's genome.'"
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A step forward, but questions remain (Score:4, Insightful)
Until we know how the DNA got there and where the original DNA went, the technique will remain a laboratory curiosity and not something, for example, that can be used in any sort of medical fashion. Still, the paper is fascinating and raises some interesting philosophical questions about what constitutes the information belonging to a species.
Full Science paper.... they did it right.. (Score:5, Informative)
The authors agreed that a single PCR wasnt enough, so they went with a hindIII digestion and an agarose gel run, to make sure that the pieces were all the right size, and nopt some funky recombination. They also managed a few southern blots to further ensure their results. AND they did 1300 Random Sequences (with luck a sequence can be read to 1000ish base pairs..), and IT ALL MATCHED.... 1.09 million base pairs all fit right...
So my point is that they did the work, made sure it was bulletproof, got accepted into a major journal. And sure they dont know the whole story of whats going on, but it doesnt matter, they DID IT, a full Genome transplant, with proper methods used to ensure its validity..
Storm
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No wait...IT MIGHT BE A PLANE!
Hold on...OH YEAH, it's AMBIGUOUS MAN!!!!
Anyone else? (Score:3, Funny)
You misunderstood (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Strong containment (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Strong containment (Score:4, Insightful)
The proteins made by this bacteria are still identical to the parent strain. The cell wall and membrane composition of the recipient cells also don't change. Furthermore, the makeup of all the daughter bacteria will be identical to the parent strain as well. There is nothing new about the daughter cells... and certainly nothing "synthetic" in the way you seem to understand the term.
However, in reference to the article, I wonder... given the ease of transforming bacteria with plasmids... or using recombination-based transduction with phages, what the benefit of whole-genome transfer is, other than to shorten the time required to transfer large blocks of genes.
Parent
Re:Strong containment (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Brought to you ny the (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Strong containment (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Strong containment (Score:4, Informative)
If someone wants to create an antibiotic-resistant superbug, it would be much easier for them to start with existing antibiotic-resistant bugs and tweak them with existing well-established techniques.
The big news of this article is not that genetic material was transplanted, but that the *full and complete* genome was transplanted. To be honest, while it's an impressive feat, for 99% of the applications mentioned in the article summary, existing "partial genome" transplantation techniques are more than sufficient. People have been doing partial genome transplants with success for nearly three decades now - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin#Timeline_of_
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That conclusion doesn't follow from the given premise.
A modern PC counts as 100% synthetic, but dropping it in the ocean will "kill" it quite thoroughly.
Now, if you mean that, in terrestrial life's 3-billion-year long arms-race, no other lifeform has come up with a substance that specifically targets this particular lifeform, I would agree. But that doesn't mean nothing can kill it, just that nothing has killed
Re:Strong containment (Score:4, Insightful)
In the context of this current example. A genome transplant simply puts an existing set of genes into a microbe that didn't have it before. It isn't synthetic, it is still natural in the sense that it isn't created by man completely from scratch. So existing antibiotic would still be effective if it can target the genome donor.
Escaping containment is probably not as big a problem as most people think. The reality of the matter is that the principles of evolution works to our favor here. When we do this kind of genetic manipulation, we create something that "works" to our satisfaction. However the methods we use are always very messy and inelegant. A success rate of 1 in 150,000 is mentioned. In order to make the process work for us, we often have to put in extra genes that help us keep track of the bacteria but does nothing to help the microbe live and survive. Our handi-work can never stand toe to toe with nature's evolutionarily derived babies. *Those* guys have had millions(billions) of years to perfect and optimize the process of surviving (and more importantly competing) in the natural environment. Laboratory subjects like the ones mentioned in the article are grown as mono-cultures where you have bacterial medium, the microbe of interest and nothing else. They live like pampered socialites. You put them in the wild and they would completely out-competed by their natural counterparts who have better survival traits like more robust metabolic pathways to better utilize available nutrients or faster response to environmental cues. Within a couple of generations, our lab subjects would most likely be either out competed to extinction or be in such a low activity state as to be insignificant.
So it is actually the reverse that you need to worry about. Our creation doesn't damage the ecosystem, it is the ecosystem that poses a greater danger to our interests. One of my professors gave a great example that nicely illustrates the situation. Not many people realized that without human intervention, corn can not grow. The food crop that we know as corn has been selectively breed over thousands of years from an ancestral weed that resembles wild grass. Left to itself, a corn field would simply shrivel and die because the plants have no way to disperse it's seeds. (The kernels can't jump out of the husk by themselves.)
The thing is humans create/modify plants/animals/bacteria for specific purposes of which "natural" survivability is a very low priority. We grow corn primarily so that it can produce big meaty seeds for us to eat. But for that matter it also becomes the favorite food of many other organisms. Sure, we care about how much of the food intended for our stomachs end up in the bellies of crop pests, but the main purpose of growing corn isn't to make them vulnerable to crop pests, it is to feed us and ours.
So in conclusion, any handi-work of ours from the brilliant, but still learning minds of our smartest geneticists would more likely than not, *NOT* menace the natural ecosystem.
Parent
childhood songs (Score:4, Funny)
one of these 150,000 things is not like the others..
while they both would kill goats if they had their 'drothers...
one of these is different, can't you see...
without a cell wall it should be easy...
[/singsong]
I'd like to take this portion of the post to apologize...
First Success? (Score:2, Funny)
de ja vu? (Score:2)
Little do they really understand. (Score:4, Interesting)
It means that someone walked into your house took all the old furniture out and replaced it with a whole bunch of different but similar furniture so that when you got home in the evening you could still sit down on the couch and watch TV.
So what everyone is going gaga over is the fact that the movers can take furniture out and replace it with different furniture. To be honest, I'm not that impressed. It has *nothing* to do with synthetic life, artificial life, etc. because they are *still* using the few hundred enzymes that nature had to evolve over billions of years. They didn't sit down and design a totally new basis for self-replicating systems that can survive in our "real" world and make a copy of itself. The hard drive in your computer is significantly more impressive. It has more parts and using a single command I can get it to copy itself. And *we* humans had to design every single circuit and craft every single part in it. Now *thats* something to be impressed with.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure that later (maybe within our lifetime) we'll be able to design out own life forms completely from scratch, but rather ironically intelligent design really is the hard way to do it. Nature used the dumb brute force algorithm (cf Deep Blue playing chess) of
Article is useless (Score:4, Informative)
And then the citation:
Abstract: But would it be too painful to actually add in relevant information from the published article? Not all of us know where to go get "Science" [sciencemag.org], nor do we have magical access [aaas.org]. Slashdot editors, if you would be so kind- stop accepting articles about papers behind paywalls. Some of us want to actually discuss the contents of these articles, the research methods, to look into what's actually going on
Anyway, genome transplantation means that maybe we can get the genome of our stem cells transplanted into bacteria. Just store lots of stem cell DNA, and then one day start the procedure to make the bacteria uptake the DNA and--- well, the current problem with this is that the human genome is much different from bacterial genomes, and so there will undoubtedly be way too many problems with the host bacteria, i.e. trying to make some of the proteins and biomolecules that actually causes self-destruction, but the concept/hope is still there.
BTW, the group that this article is about has been taking up way too much of our collective attention:
* Team claims synthetic life feat [slashdot.org]
* Venter Institute claims patent on synthetic life [slashdot.org]
* and now this.
And I should probably link over to this site [syntheticbiology.org].
I'd like to place an order for... (Score:4, Funny)
some bacteria to wash my dishes and pick up my stuff.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think they've already developed the beautiful woman who won't give you the time of day and can kick your ass.