Monday, January 28, 2008

Listening to: Humming
Portishead

Did anyone else have to stifle shudders when reading about the possibility, no scrap that, the introduction of a new life form?

The plan is to slip the synthetic chromosome inside the microscopic skin of one of the Mycoplasma bacterium, replacing its natural genome with the machine-made one and sparking the creature into a life form that can reproduce itself.

It already has a unofficial name. Synthia. A bit of an effort for me not to associate this with hollywood (I am legend, anyone?) but with a name as sexy as Synthia, it's not easy!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22827585/

Piccies!




Colonies of the transformed Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium showing up as bright blue. Image Credit: J. Craig Venter Institute




Here are some facts that might help the news hit a lil closer to home


  • Simply put, synthia is a synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce.


  • The building blocks of DNA--adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thiamine (T) are not easy chemicals to artificially synthesize into chromosomes. As the strands of DNA get longer they get increasingly brittle, making them more difficult to work with. Previously, the largest synthesized DNA contained only 32,000 base pair genomes. This one has 582,970 base pair genome, a clinical milestone in itself.


  • The synthetic M. genitalium has a molecular weight of 360,110kilodaltons (kDa). Printed in 10 point font, the letters of the M.genitalium JCVI-1.0 genome span 147 pages. Mycoplasma genitalium is a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract.



  • The researchers said they used first E. coli bacteria and then yeast cells to copy pieces of DNA and assemble them into an artificial chromosome.

I find it both alarming and amusing that we are starting off the glorious road to new life basing the template of life from a bacteria native to an area that a sun never shines on and an STD. This bodes oodles of fun im sure.

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