(3 Apr 2019) LEADIN: Swiss scientists says they built the first genome of a bacterium entirely designed by a computer algorithm.
They say the synthetic organism was produced quickly and more cheaply than others in the past, opening new avenues for the production of medicines.
STORYLINE:
A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA.
A genome contains the all the information needed to build and maintain an organism.
Now scientists here at the Swiss university ETH Zurich say they have used a computer to recreate an organism.
Lead scientist Professor Beat Christen who leads experimental biology here says: "If you take a natural genome sequence and you want to produce it through chemical synthesis this is very challenging and so we used a computer algorithm to simplyfy this natural genome sequence and rewrite the sequence into an artificial sequence of DNA letters that are easier to manufacture."
According to Chrsten the process researchers are using here is easier than trying to copy a whole genome.
The computer picked out essential duplicating pairs of DNA to make up the genome. The organism used by Christen is a freshwater bacteria called Caulobacter crescentus.
He says: "This is the model organism Caulobacter crescentus. It's a freshwater organism and we used the natural genome of Caulobacter to to feed into our algorithm to produce then the rewritten genome of Caulobacter ethensis."
The synthetic genome they created Caulobacter ethensis-2.0, does not contain all the DNA that the natural organism would have.
Beat Christen's twin brother Matthias, is a chemist who also works in this lab.
Matthias Christen says: "We did not put yet the entire genome into a single bacterial cell but we transfered segments of these genomes 37 (segments) into individual bacterial cells and tested these genome segments for functionality."
They succesfully replicated 580 of the orginal 680 genes in the organism, the remaining 100 are faulty.
His brother confirms this but he says the research is still useful: "So to have a fully operational cell you would need every gene to work perfectly. And in the current design we have roughly a hundred design flaws and these design flaws are very interesting. Also from the fundamental research perspective. They show us all the gaps in our knowledge
According to Beat Christen: "If you can write an entire microbial genome there are many applications. For instance you could think about producing a genome to make a synthetic cell that would produce vitamins, or you can think about that you can produce a tailor made microbe that we produce complex chemicals that can be used in therapies. Another application that can be foreseen is that you produce synthetic genomes and use them as DNA vaccines."
Matthias Christen too believes the research will be useful to creating medicines: "The huge benefit of designing synthetic bacteria is that you have the control what you want to create. It means with a bio technological application you can design every part of this complex machine which a sell is to make vitamins, to make therapeutics and so on. And in these perspectives a fully designed cell has better performance. So that means it has to eat less nutrients to produce the same amount to get the same amount of vitamins or therapeutics."
Scientists have previously created synthetic bacteria with a smaller genetic code in a lab, but this the first time a computer algorthim has been used to create an organism.
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