Craig Venter and his colleagues have created synthetic life!
His team first took bacterial phage Phix 174 and sequenced all 5000 base pairs with a coding program and debugging tool. From there, they split into two teams dedicated to two tasks; one solving the chemical makeup of large DNA molecules and one working on the "biological boot up". The harder of the two parts, the boot up, was focused on by using yeast to promote plasma genesis gene genome synthesis. However, yeast transplanted genomes did not boot up cells, so they methalated the genome (added methyl groups to the gene). They also removed the restriction enzyme from the recipient bacteria that would normally eat up the engineered gene.
Now they had a way to genetically engineer their own genes and transplant them into bacteria. So they did just that. They made a 500,000 base pair genetic code for the new bacteria that would include a coded intron that contained the names of all the authors and a website available to email for those that decode the genetic code-- as a watermark. This new bacteria self replicates and is classified as having a parent as a computer. The future for this technology will hopefully stem to solving problems such as virus mutations where genetic engineering can predict the environmental changes that would normally be applied to the virus and produce a vaccine for the predicted mutated virus to be seen later. This also may be used in engineering such organisms such as algae that can metabolize oil in environmental clean ups.
No comments:
Post a Comment