Last year’s artificial cell was created by J. Craig Venter and colleagues using a "top-down" approach: they replaced the genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitallium, with a synthetic DNA sequence they designed to contain the minimum set of genes required for life. It was an amazing feat, but all of the machinery necessary to make the cell work was already present within the bacterial shell. They simply hijacked it with their synthetic genome.
This year, an artificial cell project launched, and it intends to use a "bottom up" approach; Libchaer et al. plan to synthesize a viable cell from its basic components. They define these as the cell membrane, the border delineating the cell; the apparatus needed to coordinate metabolic activity; and finally the DNA, which acts as a both an information program driving metabolism and a code for remembering said program, much like a Turing tape. The hardest part, they think, will be getting these components to work with one another, as they describe in a progress report.
Read the comments on this post
Katie Holmes Victoria Beckham Missy Peregrym Sarah Gellman Eliza Dushku
No comments:
Post a Comment