WASHINGTON — Researchers have made a synthetic copy of the genome of a common virus in what they are calling an important step toward modifying organisms to do such jobs as producing hydrogen gas or removing excess carbon dioxide from the air.
Craig Venter, a scientist who played a key role in unraveling the human genome, or genetic blueprint, said the new research shows his team now has the tools for the more ambitious goal of making synthetic chromosomes to direct the activity of target bacteria.
Venter envisions engineering bacteria, which are more complex than the simple virus, to do a variety of useful tasks, although critics fear the technology also might open the door to manufacture of harmful organisms by terrorists.
The research team at Venter’s not-for-profit Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Md., used short, commercially available strands of DNA to piece together the genetic instructions for a bacteriophage — a virus that infects bacteria — in just 14 days. The DNA, when inserted into bacteria, produced infectious virus particles that can kill the cells. Bacteriophages do not infect humans.
The researchers, including Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, assembled the viral DNA from scratch in a test tube using published information on the genetic sequence of the organism, Phi X174. The assembled genome consists of 5,386 chemical building blocks called base pairs.
Last year, a team at Stony Brook University reported successful assembly of a synthetic version of the polio virus, also using off-the-shelf chunks of DNA. That genome consisted of about 7,000 base pairs. Venter said the Stony Brook team took three years to compete its virus assembly. "It’s going from years down to weeks," he said.
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