US scientists have stripped life back to its bare essentials — creating a synthetic microbe with the absolute minimum genetic information needed to grow and reproduce.
The researchers, led by Craig Venter, the genomics pioneer, made Syn3.0, the “minimal synthetic bacterial cell”, as a follow-up to their much publicised creation in 2010 of Syn1.0, the first living cell with DNA (its genome) made from scratch using laboratory chemicals.
They hope Syn3.0 or its successors will provide a platform to which synthetic biologists can add genes for particular purposes, such as producing drugs or biofuels, though the more immediate aim is to understand better the fundamental biochemistry of life.
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