New life form?

Scientists claim to have created first synthetic cell | Daniel James Devine

J. Craig Venter Institute

Forty million dollars and 15 years' worth of experiments have culminated in a goat germ some herald as the first synthetic life form. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland and California last month announced success with Mycoplasma mycoides: "This is the first self-replicating species that we have had on the planet whose parent is a computer," institute founder Craig Venter told the Reuters news service.

That claim is true in some sense. The researchers started with a digital DNA catalogue of a normal M. mycoides bacterium, a pathogen known to infect goats. They altered the DNA sequence to include several encoded "watermarks" (genetic sequences that act like fingerprints) and finally sent the complete, customized genome off to a DNA synthesis company, which artificially produced short segments of the code. The Venter Institute team then assembled those segments into a single strand nearly identical to that of a wild M. mycoides and transplanted the resulting genome into a Mycoplasma capricolum cell, a similar bacterium species. Result: The cell began behaving exactly as if it were M. mycoides, producing proteins characteristic of that species and multiplying into a colony.