Scientists Create First Cell Controlled by Synthetic Genome

May 20, 2010— -- It may not quite be "Frankenstein," but for the first time scientists have created an organism controlled by completely manmade DNA.

Using the tools of synthetic biology, scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute installed a completely artificial genome inside a host cell without DNA. Like the bolt of lightening that awakened Frankenstein, the new genome invigorated the host cell, which began to grow and reproduce, albeit with a few problems.

The research marks a technical milestone in the synthesis and implantation of artificial DNA. Venter, along with dozens of other companies and researchers in the same field, expects the research will lead to cheaper drugs, vaccines and biofuels in several years.

"This is the first synthetic cell that's been made," said Venter. "We call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer."

The research, published today in the journal Science, combines two of Venter's past achievements.

In 2007 Venter transplanted the genome of one Mycoplasma bacterium into another. Venter and his colleagues also synthesized a trimmed down, artificial version of Mycoplasma's DNA, a project known as the Minimal Genome Project. Attempts to implant the synthetic DNA all failed, until now.

In the current research Venter and his colleagues, which includes Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, first synthesized Mycoplasma's full genome. Then they added hundreds of thousands of additional base pairs to "watermark" the DNA to distinguish it from a natural one.

Venter and his colleagues created a special code, similar to Morse code, to "write" within the DNA itself. Instead of dots and dashes, they used the sequence of four DNA nucleotides, thymine (T), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and adenine (A), as a code for any letter, number or punctuation mark. Using the code, the team included the names of the study co-authors, a website, and even several philosophical quotes, complete with punctuation.

The completed DNA sequence was more than one million base pairs long. The human genome, by comparison, is more than three billion base pairs long.

No machine can turn out a single piece of DNA anywhere close to that long, however. Instead, Venter and his colleagues started with many relatively small pieces of DNA. Then the scientists transferred DNA pieces back and forth between a yeast cell and E. coli bacteria, turning the many short pieces into fewer but longer DNA segments.