One Step Closer to Manufacturing Microbes

I remember reading a little clip in The Daily Press about five years ago that claimed scientists were closing in on the ability to create synthetic life, and thinking, "Oh, crap."

It looks like Craig Venter is almost there, after synthesizing the complete genome of a bacteria that usually lives in humans, Mycoplasma genitalium. According to New Scientist's Short Sharp Science Blog, Venter plans to implant the genome into a natural Mycoplasma cell and see if it functions. If it does, the synthetic genomes can be reprogrammed to carry out specific, useful functions, and we'll have custom microbes to do things like digest waste and clean up the air.

Now, since this process requires using the machinery of a normal living cell and refitting it with a new code to use in reproducing itself, it's not necessarily artificial life in the form you might imagine. Instead, it actually sounds a lot like the way a virus hijacks a healthy cell and repurposes it for the sake of churning out more viruses. Only in this case, it's making more copies of the hybrid cell.

Back when I originally read about the viability of this sort of project (and said, "Oh, crap,") it was because the news made me a bit anxious about the integrity of the whole "life" idea. A genome doesn't really have any sort of will or awareness of its surroundings as far as we know, but in theory, a complete organism does. So, what's the difference between a living thing and a collection of nonliving, self-replicating parts?

Well, I don't know, so I'm not going to try to tackle it here. But if you're like me and went into a panic spiral, wondering:

Is that it? Did he figure out the secret behind everything? Will we be building artificial people next?

You can still rest easy (unless you were all excited about artificial people; then I'm sorry to disappoint.) Recent discoveries suggest that the genes expressed in DNA alone aren't enough to explain complex organisms like us. In fact, a lot of the regulatory work in complex organisms is actually being done by RNA.

To control which genes are switched on at a given time, and how those genes are expressed, various kinds of RNA are constantly on the move. Before finding this out, most scientists assumed RNA was not particularly important to the workings of a cell.

It will probably be a while before scientists attempt to tackle the challenge of creating RNA in all its different forms. Until then, we can look forward to the potential benefits of having microorganisms designed to help us deal with our problems.