*kiss* Thank you. Good point about engineering challenges and about the extent to which manufacturing the DNA is relevant. Even if he's only put together existing things, it's still interesting.
synthesizing a bacterial genome and putting it into an empty bacterial host actually "counts".
Yeah, I hesitated at first. Obviously the rest of the cell DOES matter, and we shouldn't ignore it because we can't make one from scratch. But on the other hand, putting DNA into an appropriate cell and seeing it if works is what DNA DOES. If you clone something, people don't whine because you used a similar-egg rather than an identical-egg to do so.
Venter's results mean that it would be possible to design a genome literally from scratch, but in practice we don't yet know enough about genes and proteins to do this ... there isn't much in principle difference between introducing a novel genome cobbled together from various different species, and introducing one synthesized abiotically;
Yeah. I think this is what they didn't say. Is the genome he sequenced taken exactly from another bacterium with maybe a few modifications? Or is it combined from several in a way which is closer to writing one from scratch than anyone else has, even if it's still very distant from it?
Re: Venter
Date: 2010-06-03 10:21 am (UTC)synthesizing a bacterial genome and putting it into an empty bacterial host actually "counts".
Yeah, I hesitated at first. Obviously the rest of the cell DOES matter, and we shouldn't ignore it because we can't make one from scratch. But on the other hand, putting DNA into an appropriate cell and seeing it if works is what DNA DOES. If you clone something, people don't whine because you used a similar-egg rather than an identical-egg to do so.
Venter's results mean that it would be possible to design a genome literally from scratch, but in practice we don't yet know enough about genes and proteins to do this ... there isn't much in principle difference between introducing a novel genome cobbled together from various different species, and introducing one synthesized abiotically;
Yeah. I think this is what they didn't say. Is the genome he sequenced taken exactly from another bacterium with maybe a few modifications? Or is it combined from several in a way which is closer to writing one from scratch than anyone else has, even if it's still very distant from it?