Scientist create first artificial life.

Scary more like it...It's advancement for the human race, but with Muslim Extremists and North Korea and the like, dangerous.
 
Sigh talk about sensationalist media..... Similar bacterial plasmid and chromosome manipulation has been going on for years already and I just think no one really had the balls to go out and try this. Yes it has many possible applications, problem is to get one metabolite produced you have to usually sacrifice another metabolite (redox balance) unless it is an overexpressed protein like insulin which is fairly easy to do. I will look thru the varsity online libraries for the paper and get back to you ppl. I have a suspicion they're not telling everything...
 
Edduck said:
Sigh talk about sensationalist media..... Similar bacterial plasmid and chromosome manipulation has been going on for years already and I just think no one really had the balls to go out and try this. Yes it has many possible applications, problem is to get one metabolite produced you have to usually sacrifice another metabolite (redox balance) unless it is an overexpressed protein like insulin which is fairly easy to do. I will look thru the varsity online libraries for the paper and get back to you ppl. I have a suspicion they're not telling everything...
Click to expand...

Hmmm they obviously won't there has to be a catch to the process
 
For anyone that is interested this is what a visual model of the synthetic bacterial genome looks like:

57-Clipboard-1.jpg


The scientists basically took thousands of short sections of M. mycoides bacterial DNA, cloned it into a yeast host, the yeast hosts ligase enzymes joined the bits together into circular DNA (cDNA). Then the inserted this cDNA into E. coli which multiplies the cDNA ALOT, then insert more short sections of DNA and repeat this three times over to end up with a 1 Mb genome. Then they transformed another bacteria species M. capricolum with the 'synthesized' genome. The host bacteria had some of its genes deleted (14 to be exact) and the new genome complemented these deletions and allowed the cell to function metabolically like a M. mycoides bacteria.

So it is not like they transferred a brand new genome into an empty shell of a bacteria host which genome was removed (not really possible anyway...) but instead took out some of the host genome and inserted a large portion of another species genome.

It is still impressive since usually plasmid inserts are rarely bigger than 10000-15000 kilobases. Hope this makes sense to someone out there....
 
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