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Scientists have been building synthetic life forms for more than a decade.
Now, for the first time, a team from the J. Craig Venter Institute, the National Institute of Standards, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has made one that can reproduce itself.
Venter Institute researchers built the first synthetic organism in 2010. In 2016, they and their partners created a newer version to see how few genes it would take to make a living creature.
The resulting single cell had 473 genes, the smallest number ever known in a living organism. (The well-known E. coli bacterium has more than 4,000.)
But the new version was too simple: when it tried to reproduce, the single-cell organism either couldn’t fully divide in two or else it would spin off filaments or other odd or partial versions of itself.
Now the team has added back 19 genes, including seven controlling cell division, and the new critter, dubbed JCVI-syn3A, can replicate.
The researchers only know what two of the seven genes associated with reproduction actually do. Their next project is to figure out the role of the other five.
TRENDPOST: In 2017, scientists inserted extra DNA instructions into a semi-synthetic one-celled organism, which then produced a brand new protein. The ability to instruct such organisms to reproduce creates the practical means to synthesize organisms able to produce drugs or other substances in mass quantities.
However, as always in technology, there’s a dark side: this ability to reproduce could be used to produce bioweapons, for example, or errors or mutations could creep in, spawning malevolent bugs we’ve never seen before and don’t know how to combat.
If technology has taught us anything, it’s that humanity can rarely foresee, and is even more rarely prepared to deal with, its consequences.