With clever chemistry Ham and his team painstakingly stitched myriad tiny blocks of 50 or so letters into fewer small pieces, grew them in the bacterium E. coli, and then turned these many small pieces into a handful of bigger ones – cassettes of genes – until they got two large pieces that could be assembled into the circular genome of the new lifeform.<\/p>\n
We had to make and manipulate synthetic DNA on a scale 10 to 20 times bigger than has been accomplished before. But we have now made the circular genome and are currently working on inserting the synthetic DNA into bacteria.<\/p>\n
We are holding our breath to see whether one or more microbes among the 100 billion in the test tube “boots up” with a strand of our man-made DNA and reproduces the DNA so a daughter cell starts metabolising and multiplying according to our version of life’s recipe.<\/p>\n
In readiness for experiments to transplant a synthetic genome, we have also applied for patents on how to create what we call “Mycoplasma laboratorium”. But I should stress that we have not succeeded in implanting the synthetic genome. Yet.<\/p>\n
If our plan succeeds, a new creature will have entered the world, albeit one that relies on an existing organism’s cellular machinery to read its artificial DNA. We have often been asked if this will be a step too far. I always reply that – so far at least – we are only reconstructing a diminished version of what is already out there in nature.<\/p>\n