Its a pretty cool bit of research, and an impressive achievement to synthesis the whole thing. I wouldn't say Venter has quite made good on his claims though, its not so much that the new genome has been digitally designed as plagiarised after all.
Will DLD end at bacteria?
I doubt that designing fully artificial genomes, especially larger scale ones, is ever going to be a particularly worthwhile endeavour practically, although they might represent significant technical achievements. It is simply too easy to modify genomes using much simpler extant technologies if one wants a specific feature, or set of features, introduced.
Perhaps in concert with research on non standard chiral biological molecules one could eventually make a mirror image system of life, but I'm not sure why you would want to or if we could even understand the sterochemistry sufficiently to make it work.
It still pretty cool though.
TTFN,
WK
™ Version 4.2
