7 ms·
Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is human-made
- kazinator 7y agoNo. Scientists didn't create the full biochemical environment in which a genome's meaning is evoked.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThis is so often overlooked. DNA is nothing without the machine to 'run' it. Which is incredibly complex in itself, more so than the DNA?
- dekhn 7y agothere are some DNA enzymes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxyribozyme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxyribozyme
- jhoechtl 7y agoDoes it reproduce in a non-deterministic way? If so ...
- kumarharsh 7y agoData scientists have a hard time predicting the states and decision paths of a Neural Network! I doubt we'd even make a serious attempt at predicting reproduction for life in this millenium (or maybe ever!)
- nsxwolf 7y agoI will keep moving goalposts until a genome and cell are synthesized atom by atom.
- kazinator 7y agoYou just revealed where your goalposts will end up when they stop moving, so that's effectively where the goalposts are.
- gpm 7y agoMaybe he means atom in the original sense of "indivisible particle", in which case it appears we can count on the physicists to keep moving the goalposts further ;)
- taneq 7y agoStill not synthetic if you didn't make your own atoms. :P
- el_cujo 7y agoThe research is interesting without the hyperbole the media puts on it for clicks.
- millstone 7y ago"Life" means splitting hairs finer and finer. Are bacteria alive? Viruses? Prions? The distinction is ultimately meaningless.
- olliej 7y agoBacteria are alive by all standard definitions of life. Generally viruses and prions are not considered alive as they are not (theoretically) capable of self replication. Viruses don't have any of the mechanisms required for self replication - they only reproduce if a different organism is coerced into duplicating the virus's genetic material. Specifically the virus genetic material gains precedence over the cell's own material once the cell dissolves the protein shell. Prions are literally misfolded proteins - saying they're alive is not different from saying any arbitrary polymer is alive - plenty of polymerization processes essentially have the same construction behaviour: rely on the bond affinities to morph neighboring identical molecules into identical construction.
- dekhn 7y agoPrions definitely self-replicate. the criterion for life is metabolism addition to self reproduction
- ncmncm 7y agoNo, they don't. When they come in contact with another, already synthesized, protein of identical composition, they alter it to match their own shape. That is a far cry from replication or reproduction. The other protein has an equal role, in its readiness to conform. Other molecules alter the shape of proteins not like themselves, in otherwise similar ways. We don't call them alive, either. Prions are interesting in that their action produces more identical action, in an exponentially growing fashion, unlike other, otherwise similar, processes. If you like, you could say the prion's shape, itself, reproduces, given a substrate of conformable prionic proteins. That makes it more like a meme.
- dekhn 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- olliej 7y agoNo. They really didn't. In this case the claim that it's a fully synthetic genome is fairly suspect, basically it boils down to this: A codon is 3 base pairs. Giving 64 possible codons. Each codon codes for an amino acid except for 3 (I think?) stop codons. This results in more unique codons than there are amino acids. As a result some amino acids are represented by different codons. In this paper all they did (not saying it's nothing, but it's definitely not what the headline says) was remove that redundancy. Effectively they ran sed over the genome of E. Coli (I think, I read it this morning which was hours ago), and replaced every occurrence of an alternative codon with a single "standard" one. Then they plonked it into an existing cell and it reproduced. The biggest challenge was probably ensuring the correct construction over the 3 million odd base pairs in their root strain. Note that of 3 million base pairs, they only made 18000 changes, far from a synthetic genome. It should not be surprising that given a correct assembly the bacteria reproduced - by design the experiment only replaced codons with a different equivalent codon.
- epicureanideal 7y agoWell, one thing they've proved by doing that is that the redundant codings didn't do anything unexpectedly important.
- Reelin 7y agoI don't think that's entirely correct. > The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. If I understand correctly, they completely removed two serine encodings and one stop codon encoding. Given how important tertiary DNA and RNA structure is, I think it's remarkable that they're alive at all.
- dnautics 7y agoIt's e coli. Theyre like weeds, plus we coddle them in the lab.
- olliej 7y agoE. Coli is super robust even in adverse conditions, and a lot of the coding regions are essentially to support those adverse conditions. Lab conditions are super friendly to E. coli - they're plated on agar that is tailored to them, kept at a temperature that is tailored to them, and the plates are sterilized so that they have no competitors. So even if the initial cells were super unhealthy, as long as it wasn't directly fatal the bacteria would grow, and bacteria evolves quickly - fast enough that I'd be interested in seeing how much change was accumulated after 24 hours. That said, they edits were deliberately just replacing like with like, so it would be expected that they survive. Interesting follow on research: If you repeatedly ensured that they dropped the alternate serine codings, could you convince it to treat the alternate codings as being something other than serine: the careful engineering would have removed the selective pressure on those codings being serine.
- jimworm 7y agoNo it's not. It could be DRM for the biotech industry though.
- JakeAl 7y agoNo, it is not artificial life, they synthesized life from that which already gave rise to life. This is an important distinction because what they did involves growing and manipulating existing systems. It's no more artificial than a an animal which has been bred, this is just on the level of molecular genetics. If we ever transcend, creating human/"machine" interfaces will require such technology. No you won't jack in like Neo, no we won't download our souls and thoughts to a computer, synthetics will replace organics slowly. The computers and people will meet in the middle.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xedeon 7y agoThis sounds like the Genesis of the movie Splice.