I am creating artificial life

[Jez]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct...s.climatechange

A synthetic chromosone! 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code, of course applying for a patent is a bit of a downer but nethertheless, great achievement!!

In other news I have spotted recently;

http://www.physorg.com/news110643473.html

Researchers think they have devised a way to calculate the rates of evolution, big and cold = bad, small and warm = good

[shvarz]

Venter always thinks big. Although I am not so certain about the value of this particular project (aside from the possibility of patenting it). The scientific knowledge obtained is ridiculously small, especially considering the cost of putting together 580000 nucleotides. It would also be a nice blow to hardcore creationists, but I doubt that real hardcore creationists will even  blink in the face of this evidence. They ignore 99.999% of current biological knowledge, what value will they place on this little tidbit?

[Peter]

Is this really that much of an acomplishment(wait how you spell the word, aw well) look at the quote.

The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up. The wholly synthetically reconstructed chromosome, which the team have christened Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been watermarked with inks for easy recognition.

Removing a fifth of the dna is in fact all that has hapened or am I wrong here. They call it artificial, and maybe all that has been done artificial is maybe the copying of the DNA, you can, if I am not wrong copy DNA pretty simple, if you now how to do it right, it's still pretty complicated.

[shvarz]

Well, yes, the sequence of the DNA was not artificial - it was derived from an existing bacteria. The point they are trying to make is that they created the DNA from scratch, not by using any existing biological systems from cells (such as DNA polymerase). That it was synthesized in a tube. This was possible on small scale for a long time and fairly cheaply too - I often order DNA primers 20-40 bases long for about 20 bucks. The trick is to piece together a huge number of small DNA fragments into one large chromosome.  It is an astonishing technical accomplishment. But, as I said, the resulting basic science is not huge here.