Dan Gibson unveiling the simplest life form on Earth — SGI’s Synthia — with just 473 genes

9 responses to “Dan Gibson unveiling the simplest life form on Earth — SGI’s Synthia — with just 473 genes”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 25, 2016 at 6:15 pm

   syn3.0 cluster
   Defragging the genome…. evolution is not the epitome of engineering efficiency. Of the 473 genes here, 79 have no understood function, but appear to be necessary for life in the organism. Of the rest, the genes fall into four major function groups: Gene expression (41%), cell membrane (18%), cytosolic metabolism (17%), and genome preservation (7%).I took a look online, and I have been eagerly awaiting this day for over a decade… With Craig Venter and a blog post from 2004. And here is Craig Venter in 2010, when he saw the first colony pics of syn1.0More of my Craig Venter photos.

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2. 

   !fatima

   Mar 25, 2016 at 9:59 pm

   this is so fascinating.

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3. 

   tedd4u

   Mar 26, 2016 at 6:15 am

   Is there a specific commercial advantage to this instead of for example just putting the genes you want into E. Cold or something like that? I think that’s commonly done for chemical production or bio cleanup.

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4. 

   tedd4u

   Mar 26, 2016 at 6:16 am

   P.s. … You turned on comments?

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5. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 28, 2016 at 4:29 pm

   Yes… I had them turned off for almost a year due to a persistent spammer/stalker. It’s good to be back. Yes, other host organisms are commonly used today. If you want to study the minimal form of life, with the least complexity of possible metabolic interactions, or if you want to synthesis an organism from the ground up, it helps to have a tiny base genome.

   For the simple microbes, there is a simple one-gene to one-protein mapping, lacking the vast regulatory regime of our nested genome. Looking at where they were able to delete genes (bottom of the list of Table 1 ), they reduced its dietary range to just glucose, removed DNA defenses, and removed a number of membrane transport proteins.

   And here is a video of syn3.0 growth.

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6. 

   sbove

   Mar 30, 2016 at 12:52 am

   The Blob 2. This could be a line from the script: "Of the 473 genes, 79 have no understood function, but appear to be necessary for life in the organism." Hehheh

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7. 

   tedd4u

   Apr 3, 2016 at 5:54 pm

   Thanks [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/]. What excites me is understanding the genes that appear to be necessary but whose function is as yet unknown. It could lead to huge advances in our understanding of the fundamentals of life on Earth, obviously with huge potential for advances in medicine.

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8. 

   jurvetson

   May 30, 2017 at 5:43 pm

   And now, Gibson’s latest paper on the The Digital-to-Biological Converter (DBC), or "life printer", just came out in Nature Biotech.

   Opening: "DNA templates, RNA molecules, proteins and viral particles were produced in an automated fashion from digitally transmitted DNA sequences without human intervention."

   Highlights: "First, we synthesized a 1.5-kb DNA fragment encoding GFP."
   "We next synthesized Orencia (abatacept), Lucentis (ranibizumab) and Herceptin (trastuzumab) antibody polypeptides"
   "We next applied the DBC to produce an RNA vaccine and a bacteriophage, both of which have potential as therapeutics for infectious diseases."
   "We also produced functional influenza viral particles (H1N1)"
   "Finally, we fully automated production of the ΦX174 bacteriophage, which has a 5,386-bp genome, on the DBC. The genome sequence was manually designed in silico"
   "with the incorporation of large-scale synthesis technologies, one can envision the DBC being used in industrial settings to enable high- volume production of biologics such as proteins and RNA vaccines."

   Summary release from SGI.

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9. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 28, 2021 at 12:43 am

   And Synthia has a Wikipedia page now too: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium

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