Craig Venter's lab succeeds in Digital Life Design (DLD). It announces the first synthesis of a bacterial genome and the development of
DLD synthetic life:
quote:
...In June 2007 another major advance was achieved when JCVI researchers led by Carole Lartigue, Ph.D., announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work was published in the journal Science, and outlined the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum, into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism’s genome with the other one’s genome.
Genome transplantation was the first essential enabling step in the field of synthetic genomics as it is a key mechanism by which chemically synthesized chromosomes can be activated into viable living cells. Today’s announcement of the successful synthesis of the M. genitalium genome is the second step leading to the next experiments to transplant a fully synthetic bacterial chromosome into a living organism and “boot up” the cell.
This connects to the
Life! What a concept! thread (where a discussion of the EDGE book is ongoing) because that book addresses claims that life is digital. As such, for all of the deniers of digital life, here is an interesting EDGE discussion between Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter, under the subtitle,
LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW:
quote:
DAWKINS: It’s more than just saying you can pick up a chromosome and put it in somewhere else. It is pure information. You could put it into a printed book. You could send it over the Internet. You could store it on a magnetic disk for a thousand years, and then in a thousand years’ time, with the technology that they’ll have then, it would be possible to reconstruct whatever living organism was here now. What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information; it’s digital information; it’s precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit-for-digit, byte-for-byte into any other kind of information.
~
VENTER: Biology is the ultimate nanotechnology and it can now be digitally designed and reconstructed.
Seems to me that Venter has made good on his claims.
Questions: Will DLD end at bacteria? Will it be a new evolutionary forces to deal with?
”HM
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