John Glass, Ph.D.Senior Scientist
Synthetic Biology Group
J. Craig Venter Institute
9704 Medical Center Drive
Rockville, MD 20850 USA
301-795-7305 Voice
240-268-4000 FAX
jglass@jcvi.org
Progress Toward a Synthetic Microbial Cell
Abstract:
To better understand how cells work, we seek to build a synthetic cell with a minimal genome. The ultimate objective is to obtain a cell in which every gene is essential and its function is understood, so that the behavior of the cell can be modeled computationally. Our starting point is M. genitalium, a bacterium with the smallest genome of any cell that has been propagated in pure culture. This project has three basic steps. We are chemically synthesizing a watermarked version of the 580 kbp M. genitalium genome. In order to enliven this synthetic genome, we developed a method a process we call genome transplantation to completely replace the genome of a bacterial cell with one from another species by installing a whole genome as naked DNA. Finally we will develop methods to produce synthetic cells from which we have excised non-essential genes eventually resulting in minimal cells. These organisms will be platforms for investigating the roles of all necessary genes and to build future more complex organisms that can meet human needs.