A team of researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla (California, USA) and the Synthetic Genomics company, led by the famous scientist author of “Life at the speed of light”, have managed to create a bacterium with only 473 genes that is able to stay alive and multiply every several hours. Compared with the more than 20,000 that make up the human genome, the figure is more than striking.
This small laboratory-created organism thus has the smallest genome in the world, since it is not possible to find it in nature. The objective of the manufacturing process of this bacterium is to know the fundamentals, the bases of life, to understand the role of genes in these key functions of life and to use this knowledge to create artificial organisms.
Already in 2010, specifically on May 20, 2010, the journal Science published a historic news story in which Venter and his team had managed to create a bacterial cell with a synthetic or artificial genome. Today, we are witnessing a new advance in this research.
Thus, the bacterium, which has been baptized with the name of JCVI-syn3.0, has the minimum genome to be able to survive and multiply. Its DNA has been constructed using synthetic biology techniques and transplanting the genome into another bacterium as a surrogate mother. The result, an organism reduced to its minimum expression.
However, researchers have not been able to unravel the exact function of 32% of the genes in the synthetic bacteria ; that is, a third of these genes have no known function, which shows that we still have much to discover about life.
The study has been published in the journal Science .
