Nearly there

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: cells, they turned into a whole one. All that remains to create what most researchers in the field would be willing to recognise as an artificial organism is to insert such a chromosome into a bacterial cell that has had its own chromosome removed. At the moment, no one is clever enough to make all of the cellular machinery that translates genes into the stuff of life. Hence the need for this shortcut. But if the newly reconstituted cell were able to grow and reproduce, the nature of its progeny would be dictated by the implanted chromosome. That, not the nature of the host ‘shell’, would define the species of the progeny.

Dr Venter’s purpose in synthesising artificial genomes is twofold. Scientifically, he wants to understand how life works. One way to do this is to discover what he refers to as the minimal genome. This is a Platonic ideal of life, which would contain only the genes absolutely necessary for survival and reproduction, and might shed light on the nature of Luca, the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth. In practice, that ideal is difficult to realise, since many genes cover for each other. He knows that 100 of M genitalium’s genes can be eliminated individually without killing it, but eliminate all of these and it dies. Assembling mix-and-match genomes with lots of different combinations of cassettes that each contain but a handful of genes should shed light on the question.

But Dr Venter is also a practical man, who wants to turn genomics into technology. Indeed, one of his other enterprises is a firm called Synthetic Genomics and he is one of the leading lights of the emerging field of synthetic biology. This seeks, among other things, to create a parts list of biological components such as DNA cassettes that could be ordered from catalogues in the way that electronic components can be.

Synthetic Genomics itself is a bit cagey about exactly, which molecular products it is working on, but one of Dr Venter’s interests is in using modified bacteria to make fuels. Natural bugs can turn out both hydrogen and methane. There is talk of modifying them to produce high-value liquid fuels, for jets, say.