This morning I was watching this youtube video from Scishow I found it amazingly interesting:
During the first part of the video it explains us how a group of scientists and researchers from “Celera Genomics” lead by the president founder of the company Craig Venter have been able to create a synthetic bacteria with the minimum amount of genes necessary for the organism to survive.
(Photo credit: Tom Deerinck & Mark Ellisman/NCMIR/University of California at San Diego)
For achieving this, they carried out the following experiment during the last years: They started with the genome of the bacteria “JCVI-syn1.0”, commonly known as “Synthia”, a Genetically engineered bacteria created by the same team in 2010 witch is considered as the world first synthetic organism. They started up with the original 901 genes from Synthia and then started deleting with restriction enzymes the genes which they didn't consider “essential” for the bacteria to live, and then testing if the new organism was able to survive after cutting down that gene.
After testing this for years, they ended up with an organism which the called JCVI-syn3.0 which presented ONLY 473 genes! a really small amount of genes considering that the smallest genome from a bacteria known in nature is 525 genes and Humans present from 20000 to 25000 genes. This experiment is not only important because it created a living organism with the smallest possible genome, but also because it showed us which genes in an organism are actually essential for it to be “alive”, considering to be alive to be able to process organic matter into energy allowing it to grow and therefore reproduce by replicating itself.
What is more interesting about these experiment is that inside of these genome there are 149 genes which scientist don’t actually know what they code for! This is 31% of the genome of the bacteria and we don’t have any idea of what it does, but we know they are completely essential for the bacteria for being able to live. This is like saying that we don’t know one third of essential biology, and shows us how much we still have to research for achieving full knowledge in this field.
On the other hand, this experiment is part of our first steps in creating synthetic life, and it carries some ethical issues with it which consist in what some people refer to as “playing god”. There’s an article on The New Scientist about this, and it tell us that we’re far from “playing god” yet. This is the link to the article.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030672-700-breakthrough-in-synthetic-biology-is-far-from-playing-god/
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