BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | A step closer to ‘synthetic life’
There are certainly many more steps to go to make “synthetic life”, but this technology has pretty interesting implications for our fundamental understanding of how cells go from genomes to “life”. How are epigenetic effects involved? How do the proteins and membranes of the recipient cell affect the gene expression? How do you “boot up” a cell without this magical membrane already in place?
Beyond that: how can we make genomes when we have no idea what so much of the genome does? Most genes are not characterized in a way that makes sense for synthetic genomics. Can there be such a thing as “starting from scratch” if we don’t know all of the ingredients?
I just got back from the FBI Conference on Synthetic Biology. To whet your appetite for all things biosafety/biosecurity, here is the JCVI policy report on synthetic genomics.
