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Synthetic Stripped-Down Bacterium Could Shed Light on Life's Mysteries

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health...e-form-n545081

Scientists have created a stripped-down life form, a bacterium with a minimal number of genes needed to keep it going.

They hope to use it as a platform to create designer life forms, and say it's already taught them some important, and humbling, lessons about the essence of life.

The little bacterium has 473 genes.

And the team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California admit they don't know what a third of the actually do.

They just know the microbe dies without them.

"We don't know the key elements of about a third of life," said Venter, who founded the institute.

But they are close, Venter's team reported in the journal Science.

"It's the smallest genome thus far known on planet Earth of a self-replicating organism," Venter told NBC News.

Venter, who helped lead the effort to sequence the full human genome, has been trying for two decades to create synthetic life.

His ultimate goal ? A system for custom-making life forms on a computer.

"In theory we should be able to add genes to this and evolve it to other species," Venter said.


Electron micrographs of clusters of JCVI-Syn 3.0 cells magnified about 15,000 times.
This is the world’s first minimal bacterial cell.
Its synthetic genome contains only 473 genes.