EPTOn May 22 2010 02:11 reincremate wrote:
Mass hydras.
Mass hydras.
Best post in the thread.
Scientists in the US Create Synthetic Life - Page 8
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Quesadilla
United States1814 Posts
Best post in the thread. | ||
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Servolisk
United States5241 Posts
On May 23 2010 16:19 ThunderChunky wrote: There can be many minimal genomes and we will probably learn more from having many than having only one. It is a worthy goal to pursue for synthetic biologists who would like to be able to create life from scratch. The problem of making a minimal genome? The problem of reducing the cost to synthesize long pieces of DNA? Do you know of some cost reduction they have done which makes this a technique which is practical? All I have seen are standard techniques, in a painstaking form. If you had some project for synthetic biology, why would you want to transplant an entire genome rather than the specific genes for the task. Wouldn't you want to modify a bacteria which is already suited for the task and can be modified the way current genetically modified organisms are? That is an immensely easier job. To understand all of the unknown genes? In what organism is that close? It is a very difficult task for the genes you cannot understand by knockout/overexpression and other typical methods. A lot of that time and money was because of mistakes. They learned things a long the way and developed the technology. They developed new strategies for synthesizing long pieces of DNA. It is same thing that happened with sequencing technology during the genome project. What was the new technology? It was not explained in the Science publication. Everything they did was achievable with preexisting techniques, and it is not surprising that given a long amount of time someone could do that with current approaches. | ||
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Narwhal
United Kingdom314 Posts
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ThunderChunky
United States24 Posts
On May 24 2010 07:27 Servolisk wrote: Do you know of some cost reduction they have done which makes this a technique which is practical? All I have seen are standard techniques, in a painstaking form. There were no standard techniques for synthesizing such large pieces of DNA before they started this work. This is the first time it has been done. Now the bar has been set so future improvements can potentially reduce the cost. If you had some project for synthetic biology, why would you want to transplant an entire genome rather than the specific genes for the task. Wouldn't you want to modify a bacteria which is already suited for the task and can be modified the way current genetically modified organisms are? That is an immensely easier job. It depends on what the goal. Right now the tools for synthetic biology are still being built. Yes, standard genetic engineering techniques are useful for some tasks, but the future of synthetic biology is being able to create a cell from the ground up built for a specific task. Venter is pioneering the field and making way for future scientists to follow. To understand all of the unknown genes? In what organism is that close? It is a very difficult task for the genes you cannot understand by knockout/overexpression and other typical methods. We are close to understanding how all genes are regulated in E. coli, that doesn't tell us what they all do. For a minimal genome the task will be easier. We do need to know what all the genes do, we just need to know what most of the essential ones do. But the goal of understanding what all the genes do is something the field of microbiology is pursuing today. What was the new technology? It was not explained in the Science publication. Everything they did was achievable with preexisting techniques, and it is not surprising that given a long amount of time someone could do that with current approaches. From the article: "Several hurdles were overcome in transplanting and expressing a chemically synthesized chromosome in a recipient cell. We needed to improve methods for extracting intact chromosomes from yeast. We also needed to learn how to transplant these genomes into a recipient bacterial cell to establish a cell controlled only by a synthetic genome." As far as synthesizing long pieces of DNA, that was detailed in the 2008 article. There were no preexisting techniques for doing such a task before hand. | ||
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Servolisk
United States5241 Posts
After all, Venter is only boasting to people who have no molecular biology background. I thought it is better to shake my head, because I thought this was a ego-inflating move, or a move to attract funding for their institute... however... This will be a key part of Venter's second attempt to patent the entire field of "synthetic biology", and genetic engineering. Fortunately, the first time he tried that, his ridiculously broad and baseless attempt to do the same thing failed. This time he has gone on a prior propaganda campaign and deluded non-scientists. Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10150685.stm I've read through some of these patents and the claims are very, very broad indeed," Professor Sulston told BBC News. "I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques." In summary, they have an odd spectacle with no uses, which made no technological advances, and has unestablished, vague conceptual connections to an entire field, and also a huge press campaign targeted to non-scientists for the goal of patents, which if awarded, would severely, severely halt progress. For example, the post earlier about using microbes to make fuel, that use would not be allowed because of infringement. Venter, who was involved in the human genome project, tried to patent the gene information they played a part in finding. It failed, but if it had succeeded, it is obvious there would have been very little biological research progress since that happened. It is a scary thought to imagine this ignorant display is not harmless after all but could actually become a major obstacle to scientific progress. | ||
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SoManyDeadLings
Canada255 Posts
Does NOT equal Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. | ||
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CCGaunt
United States417 Posts
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Servolisk
United States5241 Posts
http://io9.com/5546882/venters-synthetic-life-is-the-faucet-drip-that-would-be-a-monsoon Last week, bio-enterpreneur icon Craig Venter burst into the limelight yet again by announcing his "synthetic organism." The work duly appeared in Science and the predictable shouting ensued, from fears that humans are "playing God" to hails of "artificial life". Several important issues got lost in the din. Let's leave the obvious potential objections aside – after all, humans started futzing the moment their frontal cortex became prominent and the consequences of this, intended and not, have decisively affected earth and all life on it. Instead, let's examine the clothes of this emperor closer up. To stick with the metaphor, Venter's latest is like exactly reproducing a large cloak onto a new piece of fabric identical to that of the original. It's not like creating a new garment or even cutting and pasting from previous garments to make a quilt, crazy or otherwise. What Venter really announced was that a team under his direction inserted a chemically synthesized genome into Mycoplasma and succeeded in getting the resulting bacterium to propagate. The Venter work is not a discovery, let alone a paradigm shift. It's a technological advance and even then not of technique but only of scale. The experiment is merely an extension of a well-known principle that every biology lab uses routinely: namely, that bacterial genomes can be modified almost at will (barring a few indispensable regions) and in such ways as to turn the bacteria into potent mini-factories for specific proteins. The Venter bacterium is actually pedestrian because it carries an exact duplicate of a naturally occurring genome. Its only artificial aspects are the molecular "flags" that its makers included in the synthesis to mark the artificial genome for further tracking – standard operating procedure in all such modifications. Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them). To propagate the synthesized chromosome, the Venter team used a bacterium whose endogenous DNA had been removed but was otherwise intact. This means that they used existing natural components to do the real task of propagation – the entire structure and machinery of the host cell. This makes the endeavor even less groundbreaking than injecting genetic material into a mammalian egg or stem cell (as was done to produce Dolly the sheep with far less advanced technology). Lastly, this does not bring us a single step closer to engineering customized functions, from vacuuming up oil spills, excess CO2 or methane to producing chlorophyll or unique drugs. Creating a synthetic cell totally de novo is theoretically doable but far below the event horizon. Altering existing genes and/or creating ones for novel functions is more distant still, because making the coding part is only a small part of the task - if we figure out how to get them to encode it, for starters. Persuading them to express at the right place and time is equally crucial. So is coaxing them to work in eukaryotic cells which, unlike easy-going bacteria, have carefully guarded compartments – the nucleus in particular. In short, the Venter endeavor was expensive, glitzy – and banal. My advice to bioethicists is to save their energy for truly fearsome items, such as recombinant bacteria or viruses that may arise from species pushed together by abrupt dislocations of habitats. I've done far more "dangerous" work in my near-constant cloning than this sheep attempting to pass as a wolf… nay, a lion. It is ironic that not only is it not a breakthrough it is anti-progressive when you account for their use of it to try to gain a monopoly on genetic engineering techniques. One can only hope that the ridiculousness will fail once gain, but I worry if the judge is as naive as the media who presented this as a breakthrough he could be deluded. | ||
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Zoler
Sweden6339 Posts
On May 24 2010 07:29 Narwhal wrote: This makes me sad. It's wrong. This is just our advanced form of evolution  Edit: 4999!!!! | ||
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