On the way to Synthetic Life

Less than two years ago at the Craig J Venter Institute, the homonymus founder of the Center, announced to the World that Synthia, the first synthetic organism, was created into their labs.

Of course, this event got a lot of visibility from the mass media all around the World, since the humankind has never achieved this big step that put it in a market until now just businnes of one actor: God.

But let's analyze with more attention what the Craig Venter's band really performed and, for doing this, we just begin with the initial part of the press conference he gave in the june of the 2010:

"We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell, a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer, building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals, assembling that chromosome in yeast, transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species. So this is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer. It also is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code."

Hence, they have started to design the primary sequence of the future Synthia genome in the computer and in this step there is a very important key of reading of the overall procedure. In fact the researchers at the Venter Institute for their synthetic organism have mimed the genetic information of one natural bacterium M. mycoides. This is the blueprint of Synthia is always a natural-one and it was shaped from natural selection since millions of years.  So its real parent is not a computer at all and to avoid any kind of mislead we should talk of semi-synthetic life...

By the way the Venter's group performed a minimization of the M. mycoides genome by the knock-out of dispensable genes (about 100 over 485 genes) in order to obtain a bacterial with the smallest set of genes of any known organism capable of indipendent grow in lab (Wow!).

 The second challenging step was to assembly the (semi-)synthetic chromosome in yeast and without any doubts in the semantic field this  rapresents a very innovative and elegant procedure

They than performed the biggest cloning ever made  assembling a very huge DNA string (1.08 Mkb!!!) by combination of in vitro enzymatic methods and in vivo recombination in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Schematic experimental procedure

Once accomplished the production of the (semi-)synthetic chromosome of M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0,  the construct was transfered in another bacterium,  M. capricolum, which acted as recipient. 

What does it mean? From a technical point if view it means that the assembled new chromosome were moved into the membrane-boundary of another bacterium deprived of own-genome, in order to get  M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 in the condition to start to be alive. But at the same time this means, again, that maybe could be much more intellectually correct talking about semi-synthetic...

Anyway the achivements of this controversial biologist and his group is a millestone in the road toward the real synthetic era (thanks to the people as Craig Venter not so far from now), when we will able to program in front of a computer the desiderable traits of an organism and gain from their inimaginable potential.