And Craig Venter said, “let there be life.”

I’m sorry, what?

It’s a nice technical achievement. It involved the (remarkable) successful debugging of a fatal error halfway through. It didn’t hurt that he had $40m on his side.

But he (I should say, “they”) basically put a synthetic copy of a natural genome into a natural placeholder. No new genome was designed, only a few watermarks inserted into places that probably don’t do too much anyway.

This is like showing you have the ability to upload and run a remarkably complex program to a remarkably complex computer. No mean feat, but both the program and the computer were taken as given — he didn’t write the program, he didn’t build the computer, and he only managed to correct one particular egregious wire-transmission error that was induced on the upload.

This is still a long way from “god”-like status.

One way that someone might go about actually “designing” a genome would be to take an existing natural genome and try to edit it down to a “minimal version” with only the basic necessities required to survive and reproduce. To go back to the software analogy, this would be like “taking God’s source code and trying to edit out the comments.” It wouldn’t be like ‘rolling your own’ genome from first principles, but it’d be an important first step. My understanding, from the accompanying Science News article with this paper, is that that’s how this project actually started… but they couldn’t get even this minimal genome idea to work (no wonder: it’s hard!) and so they reverted to just the possibility of synthesizing an existing genome from scratch without any minimizing edits.

Venter’s a smart guy, and he’s (clearly) got a good team and a lot of money — but he’s trying to turn this into a business, and publicizing one’s own research in the most groundbreaking paradigm-shifting terms is the name of the game at this level. It’d be smart to pass any hype about who is or isn’t god through that filter first… (The first graf of the paper even uses the word paradigm, natch.)

…but the logical implications of getting this to work are astonishing.

But the logical implications of getting this to work have been clear for quite some time. There are multiple journals devoted to research in the field. There are research institutions for the subject, at universities across the country and around the world. There are yearly competitions for undergraduates interested in participating in similar research. Do a google search for names like Tom Knight, Drew Endy, George Church, Ron Weiss…

Venter’s a smart scientist who’s adequately funded and an effective salesman for his own results. Comparing him to God or Gutenberg is seriously overblown.

The third-most significant thing that happened here is that they transplanted a synthetic genome into a blank cell and it grew, proving that the genome was viable.

The second-most significant thing is that they synthesized from scratch a large and viable genome. Granted, their genome was a trivially-modified copy of one that was already proven viable and was given to them by nature, but their accomplishment demonstrates that we can now make arbitrary sequences of sufficient length to be viable, even if we don’t yet understand what else viability requires.

The most significant thing that happened was that they debugged their code.

Synthetic biology is the biotechnological equivalent to Eric Drexler’s nanotechnology. Venter’s work is an incremental step in making this a reality. I think as fully developed technology, synthetic biology will lead to “biological” buildings and houses that grow themselves and an completely biological infrastructure that con-exists along with the industrial one.

“God” would entail boostrapping up from soup, not inserting a genome that codes for ribosomes, tRNAs, RNA polymerase, and the like.

The implication of this is that there are no more technical barriers to creating functioning organisms with synthetic genomes. We can really begin to understand how genetics works at the level of the genome. Truly novel organisms are a ways off, but this starts us down that road.

The Manhattan Project was in a large part due to the mobilization of enormous resources and not because of any theoretical problems. An uncontrolled fission reaction was already theoretically possible, but actually building a bomb to take advantage of it was a different matter all together. The number of technical issues that had to be worked out was enormous. No other country had the resources to spare on something with questionable prospects for success.

So to here, the team has demonstrated that there are no remaining technical issues and sponsors are far more likely to provide resources when they know a project is doable with current methods and technology.

DK, we hardly need to know those things for this to be useful. Making things without understanding how they operate has been the norm for virtually all of human history. What this really does is open up a huge range of options for studying genetics and other biological phenomena. Then we can put that knowledge to use.

Actually showing something to be technically feasible is an extremely important step. If all that was required was thinking something is technically feasible, we would have had fusion fifty years ago.

Billare – the significance (as I see it, is such):

Venter and company now have the capability (as long as they have the $$$), to design and implement a custom bacteria de novo. By de novo, I mean from inside a computer, not by editing another bacteria genome one piece at a time, which is what most scientists do. This is a somewhat signficiant technical achievement, because it’s difficult to assemble large pieces of DNA accurately (as they noted, when their first attempt failed because of 1 bp being mutated out of 1 millions bp). In terms of new biology learned…..nothing. Nothing surprising has come from this paper. The interesting stuff will come later when they try and build the minimal bacteria (ie, a bacteria with as small of a genome as possible) or whatever else they are planning.

Here are the reasons I’m not really impressed:

We can already synthesize genomes. This is just bigger than anyone has ever done. Most labs don’t have 40 million dollars to pay someone to make it.

They copied an existing bacteria genome. They didn’t build a new one from scratch (but they are trying now, I’m sure).

They put their “synthetic” genome into an already living, slightly modified, bacteria. I’m a geneticist, not a computer scientist, but I think this very crude analogy works: it’s as if they copied Linux line for line, then installed it on a working computer running Windows.

This is a very important caveat. Genomes are more than just A,T,G, and C. They are folded into complex and precise structures by a variety of proteins. They have chemical tags that indicate whether a certain portion of the genome should be actively read. Because bacteria are so simple and robust, we can just dump a new genome in billions of them, and a few will properly organize and program the genome. But there’s no way this crude approach will work on more complicated organisms. Which is why we don’t have dinosaurs. Science is (usually) a series of small steps.

In short: not interesting, yet. Emphasis on “yet”.

“You lack the biological background to untangle these matters.”

What is your basis for assuming this? It appears you misread most of my post as it is. I didn’t say anything about this helping us understand protein folding.

What it does do is give us the capability to move, delete, or add genes on a genomic scale. We can then insert the altered genome into a bacteria and examine how the changes affect it.

Demonstrating the efficacy of this method possibly increases the amount of funding a sponsor is willing to provide for similar research. It lowers the perceived risk because it’s been done before, even for different methods.

Chris T:
One very interesting result from the paper is the fact that one bp error rendered the entire strand inoperative.

For a biologist, there is nothing interesting or surprising in it. A single base pair deletion that introduces reading frame shift in an essential gene will always kill. That’s 100 years old genetics and 50 years old molecular biology. That is exactly what happened there: product of dnaA is essential for chromosomal replication. Their “debugging” only illustrates the [already obvious] need for quality control.

And Craig Venter is a quite interessting guy, would love to read more from him

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