God loses monopoly: Synthetic Genomics creates first synthetic bacterial cell

Biofuels Digest
May 21, 2010
Jim Lane

In California, a long-term monopoly on the creation of bacterial cell life — held, reportedly, by God (or the open-source community known as evolution) — was broken yesterday when a scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison announced completion of the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell.

Say ‘Hey’ to Syndi
Her formal name is M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 – you can call her Syndi.

In a publication in Science, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.

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