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i remember ginkgo bioworks in the news, along w/ the MIT mail order biobank. Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new medicines, etc? Has

• jrkelly 14y ago
  >Has any synth organisms other than what's come out of >Venter's lab been created and proven viable? You should think of the Venter work as a technical demonstration of building a very large piece of DNA (>500 kilobases, a small genome) and transplanting a whole genome into a microbe that had its original genome removed. Most of the immediate practical applications of synthetic biology don't need pieces nearly that large. If you want to add a genetic pathway to produce a chemical product, it's typically <10 additional genes that need to be added to a production microbe and that will be <50 kilobases typically. > Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new > medicines, etc? There are lots of industrial microbes out there now. For example, most Amino Acids that go into food supplements are made at massive scale - >1M tons/year by engineered microbes.