Scientists Build Possibly The First Man-Made Genome

hackingbear writes "Wired is reporting that researchers have created the longest synthetic genome to date by threading together four long strands of DNA. 'Leading synthetic biologists said with the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science, the first synthetic life could be just months away — if it hasn't been created already. [...] The ability to synthesize longer DNA strands for less money parallels the history of genetic sequencing, where the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars to about $10,000. Just a few years ago, synthesizing a piece of DNA with 5,000 rungs in its helix, known as base-pairs, was impossible. Venter's new synthetic genome is 582,000 base-pairs.' As a programmer, I'm most excited by the possibility of a new platform and the programming jobs that will be created by it."

Re:Impossible?

[bumby]

unless you believe in "intelligent" design, life on earth wasn't synthesized. At least not by the definition of the word in this domain.

Re:But, but...

[KublaiKhan]

The official position of the Catholic Church, IIRC, is that animals do not have a soul--so no problem there; just define any artificially created lifeforms as non-human animals, and then you'll have no theological problems.

Not sure about how the other 5/6 of the world's population would think about it, though.

Re:whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Dude. HTML is a completely known entity. There are VALIDATERS for it, and the quality of most HTML is rubbish. An influenza [wikipedia.org] virus has only 10 genes, meaning it doesn't take much "code" to make some really bad bad shit.

Re:An omission

[reverseengineer]

The parent poses an important question, and as it turns out, Mycoplasma genitalium was a clever choice in that regard: its genome is so streamlined as to lack the machinery to methylate its DNA. In prokaryotes like M. genitalium, methylation is mostly used to distinguish self from non-self DNA, quite useful (restriction enzymes can be used to carve up non-self DNA then), but not strictly necessary; in eukaryotes, it plays a vital role in regulation of gene transcription, so appropriate methylation is very important.

Analyses of M. genitalium suggest it may have orginally had methylation capabilities, but has lost them over time: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=206970&blobtype=pdf [nih.gov]

In our analysis, restriction enzyme digestions of M. genitalium genomic DNA, using MspI and HpaII, did not support the fact that CpG methylation currently exists in this genome as evidenced by the identical pattern produced by both restriction enzymes (data not shown). Whether the disparity in CpG dinucleotides in the M. genitalium genome is the result of a now extinct CpG methylase activity or related instead to the codon usage of this organism will require further analysis.

Re:It's called transubstantiation.

[Anonymous Coward]

He just has to spit. According to Catholic Encyclopedia transubstantiation happens in the mouth, not in the stomach.

synthetic smallpox virus now within our reach?

[ekrock]

It doesn't even need to be a "super" virus that we haven't seen before. The smallpox virus's genome has been sequenced and published in publicly-available literature back when everyone assumed you could never synthesize it from scratch. Smallpox has a DNA genome that is only 186,000 base pairs long--shorter than Venter appears to have already synthesized. This means that Venter, or anyone who has the same technology, could probably synthesize the smallpox genome from scratch. Now I'm absolutely not a virologist, scientist, or doctor of any kind, but it seems like at that point, you'd only need to insert that genome into a capsid that was "good enough" to shoehorn the viral genome into a human cell (even if the capsid being used wasn't the actual smallpox capsid). After that, the genome would take over the cell, start churning out copies of actual smallpox virions, and the WHO has already noted that a single human infected with smallpox constitutes an immediate global health emergency due to its infectiousness, its lethality, and the fact that most of the global population hasn't been immunized. I'm no fan of the Commerce Department's export control system by any means, but this technology appears potentially far more dangerous for producing weapons of mass destruction than any nuclear weapon development tool ever was. If we wind up in a situation where anyone with a master's in biology and a lab can synthesize smallpox, it seems naive to assume that no one will do anything stupid or malevolent. Twelve Monkeys, anyone?

Re:Thanks for the SuperFlu, Craig!

[Sanat]

I'm not going to argue with you about it, I was on a SAC minuteman missile combat targeting team for eight years that was responsible for setting the war plans, setting the targets, installing the launch codes and aligning the missile to true north (before some new self aligning innovations were installed) so I believe I have the right to make my point. Gravity brings down everything including all of the dirt and rock and debris that is highly radioactive. A dead zone for all who enter. That is why we have ground bursts!