Genome pioneer to try to build artificial life
Date: 25-Nov-02
Country: USA
Author: Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
Craig Venter, former scientific director of Celera Genomics, and now head of The Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, said his new institute would try to create an artificial chromosome.
The synthetic chromosome will carry artificial genes to replace the genetic material of a living bacterium. The idea is to try to make microbes that can scrub the air of excess carbon dioxide - perhaps helping to alleviate global warming - or to produce cheap hydrogen fuel.
It would be a first step towards creating an artificial life form, said Venter, who has won a modest $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to fund his research.
They will work with the tiniest known living organism, the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria. It has just 517 genes on a single chromosome.
Some scientists are working to genetically engineer living bacteria to do dirty work, such as absorbing radiation or toxic chemicals. Their approach is to insert genes from one species into another.
Venter wants to take a different approach - stripping down Mycoplasma to the bare essentials and then adding back genes to do the job at hand.
"What we are doing is just trying to substitute a synthetic chromosome for the existing chromosome," Venter said in a telephone interview.
"To do that we have to either remove or destroy the chromosome that is already in the cell and replace it with an artificial one and see if the cell could use the chromosome as its instruction set."
It would be a first step towards his eventual goal of creating an artificial organism from scratch.
"We have just begun what will probably be long but intellectually challenging work in trying to create a synthetic genome," Hamilton Smith, a Nobel prizewinning geneticist who has left Celera to work on the new project, said in a statement.
Mycoplasma genitalium lives in the human genital tract and lungs, causing no known disease, but has fewer genes than any other organism mapped so far. While humans have between 30,000 and 40,000 genes, this bug gets along fine with just 517.
In 1999, Venter and colleagues at The Institute for Genomic Research said they had removed all the genes not essential for life from the little bacteria. The streamlined version seemed to function fine on 300 genes.
Using a stripped-down, artificial set of genetic instructions should make it possible to control the bacteria, Venter said.
"We want genes just associated with the process we want to do so there is no way these organisms could survive outside the test tube, let alone outside the lab," he said.
It might be someday possible to build a car that could run on garbage, he said.
"Fuel cells are all you need," he said, noting that garbage dumps now produce methane, a natural gas.
"Wouldn't it be easy if everybody just had a little pool of bacteria that did that instead of relying on fossil fuels and even going to war over them?"
