Few living scientists have much name recognition outside the field they work in. One who does, though, is Craig Venter. In the 1990s Dr Venter ran a privately financed version of the Human Genome Project, using better technology than the public project (which sensibly then copied his approach). He followed that by synthesising the first working virus made from off-the-shelf reagents, and then the first working synthetic bacterial genome, a tweaked copy of the DNA of Mycoplasma mycoides.
One ambition, though, has eluded him. This is to reduce the genetic instruction set of a bacterium to the minimum that will keep the bug alive. Partly, the purpose of this minimal-genome project is to understand the core nature of bacterial being, which may even shed light on how the group evolved; and partly it is to create a simple and reliable chassis for the construction of new organisms that could do useful things for humanity, as a contribution to the emerging field of synthetic biology. Now, he thinks he has done it.
The recipe, published in this week’s Science in a paper authored by him, Clyde Hutchison (a colleague at the J....Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1RwI1vE
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