First Computer Generated Genome
May 14, 2019 | Terry Sharrer
Quoting directly: “Scientists at ETH Zurich have created the first fully computer-generated genome of a living organism. The brand new genome, named Caulobacter ethensis-2.0, was built by essentially cleaning up and simplifying the natural code of a bacterium called Caulobacter crescentus. For now it exists as one large DNA molecule and not a living organism itself, but the team says this is a huge step towards creating completely synthetic life and medicinal DNA molecules.” A working hypothesis is that synthesized organisms could be “factories” for making vaccines, vitamins or drugs, similar to recombinant E. coli producing human insulin. MORE