Luckily, someone did an experiment similar to this one. They wrote the genome (and ONLY the genome) of a unicellular organism synthetically. Then they've remov

Luckily, someone did an experiment similar to this one. They wrote the genome (and ONLY the genome) of a unicellular organism synthetically. Then they've removed the genome of an existing cell of a different species. The've then inserted the genome they created from scratch. The genome worked and produced versions of everything it needed, and cell division happened etc. Everything was produced & worked. So - they bootstrapped that genome using machinery of the empty cell w/o the genome, but from that point on, the new genome produced everything needed for many other cells & itself. (Venter's papers creating synthetic life) In fact, following that, the same team refactor that genome to create a minimum viable genome, the MVP of genomes if you will, just to see how few genes you can get away with! Here's an article: http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633 http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-rac...