US scientists announced today that they had for the first time created a synthetic cell - a living cell controlled by a synthetic genome, according to dpa. "This is the first synthetic cell that's been made," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who led the research team. "We call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer." The team has earlier chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, and has also transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. What Thursday's announcement in Science magazine means is that the scientists combined both methods to create a synthetic cell. "This becomes a very powerful tool for trying to design what we want biology to do. We have a wide range of applications (in mind)," Venter said. The researchers claim the method will help them investigate how life works and can be used to create bacteria designed for the production of biofuels and cleaning the environment. They are planning to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make new hydrocarbons, and are also working on ways to speed up vaccine production. Other potential benefits could be making new chemicals or food ingredients and cleaning up water, Venter said. "This is an important step we think, both scientifically and philosophically. It's certainly changed my views of the definitions of life and how life works," Venter said. In the study, scientists synthesized the genome of a small bacteria called Mycoplasm mycoides and added DNA sequences that "watermark" the genome to distinguish it from a natural one. Machines can only assemble relatively short strings of DNA at a time. So the scientists inserted the sequences into yeast, whose DNA- repair enzymes linked the strings together. Next they transferred the medium-size strings into E coli and then back into yeast. After three rounds, they had produced a genome over a million base pairs long. The scientists then transplanted the synthetic Mycoplasm mycoides genome into another type of bacteria, called Mycoplasm capricolum. Although 14 genes were deleted or disrupted in the transplant bacteria, they still looked like normal Mycoplasm mycoides bacteria and produced only Mycoplasm mycoides proteins. The controversial issue of engineering life in a laboratory raises several ethical and legal concerns, a fact that Venter and his colleagues acknowledged as they asked for a bioethical review in the late 1990s. "I think this is the first incidence in science where the extensive bioethical review took place before the experiments were done," Venter said. "It's part of an ongoing process that we've been driving, trying to make sure that the science proceeds in an ethical fashion, that we're being thoughtful about what we do." Synthetic Genomics Inc (SGI), a California company founded by Venter, has provided an estimated 30 million dollars in funding for this experiment since 2005.
