The genome of Mycoplasma genitalium is one of life’s smallest
Genetic engineering isn’t new. In fact, humans have essentially been doing it since we started selectively cross-breeding certain plant species for agricultural purposes thousands of years ago. But in all previous cases, we’ve been using the organism’s own DNA, whether that was corn, chicken, or those big fat tomatoes you see in the grocery store. Recently, however, researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute built the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium from scratch.
Last fall, Discover named this one of the six most important experiments in the world before the results were even published. Following its publication in Science1, it has received equally abundant media attention from other sources including Nature , The Guardian. , and the New York Times So what is all the hubbub about?
In its simplest terms, the experiment is little more than a proof-of-concept in a long line of similarly ground-breaking experiments by the Venter Institute. They have already synthesized a virus genome, changed a species of a bacterium by replacing its genome with another, and sequenced the first public human genome. But the potential implications of this particular experiment are especially wide-ranging. The researchers hope to one day ‘install’ certain metabolic genes into the synthetic genome to give it specific functions such as hydrogen production for energy. In the future, such techniques could be used for constructing similar bacteria for use in environmental applications such as bioremediation of contaminated groundwater aquifers.
Employing these ‘super bugs’ do our environmental dirty work has long been on the mind of most researchers in interested scientific and engineering fields, but it really is still a vision far into the future. Before we ever release entirely new organisms into nature, we had better know a lot more than just how to create a genome and give the bacterium specific or enhanced abilities to break down contaminants. We need to understand how these bacteria will interact with other bacterial species, and most importantly, how they will evolve outside of the laboratory.
Clearly, there is much work to be done, but the work at the Venter Institute continues to push the limits of where many fields are heading, even if experiments such as this appear at the time to simply be scientists flexing their experimental muscles.
1 D.G. Gibson et al., 2008, Complete chemical synthesis, assembly, and cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium genome, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1151721