Venter: Changing one species into another

Over at Edge.org, John Brockman says:

In a news cycle dominated by Paris Hilton and the Apple iPhone, Craig Venter has announced the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another. This is news, bound to affect everyone on the planet. Below is the press release from Venter's Institute, along with links to the scientific paper published in Science, and the international press.

The day after the announcement, Edge talked to Venter, who had the following to say about the research underway:

"Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do.

" This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years."

Here is one of many dozens of news articles -- snip:

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, said the transplantation technique, which leads to the transferred genome taking over the host cell, was "a landmark accomplishment."

"It represents the complete reprogramming of an organism using only a chemical entity," Ebright said.

Image: Colonies of the transformed Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium, courtesy J. Craig Venter Institute.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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