1.28.2008

By jove, he's done it!

The geniuses at the J. Craig Venter Institute have managed to synthesize, in it's entirety, the genome of a bacterium. They started with E. coli, which was used to store the artificial chromosomes, and then hi-jacked the replication mechanism of S. cerevisae to assemble the genome.


It's important to note that they've not created an organism, per se, but just the genome. So, says Hamilton Smith, their next step will be inserting the genome into a cell, to see if it will reproduce.


Can you imagine if your job was creating a genome? Man, you'd get all the ladies.












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