Craig Venter has applied for a patent at more than 100 national offices to make a bacterium from laboratory-made DNA.
It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.
DNA contains the instructions to make the proteins that build and run an organism.
The J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is applying for worldwide patents on what it refers to as Mycoplasma laboratorium based on DNA assembled by scientists. When asked whether the world's first synthetic bug was thriving in a test tube, Dr Venter said: "We are getting close."
The Venter Institute's US Patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" that is made using those genes. To create the synthetic organism his team is making snippets of DNA, known as oligonucleotides or "oligos", of up to 100 letters of DNA.
To build a primitive bug, with about 500 genes in half a million letters of DNA, Dr Venter's team is stitching together blocks of 50 or so letters, then growing them in the gut bug E. coli. Then they turn these many small pieces into a handful of bigger ones until eventually two pieces can be assembled into the circular genome of the new life form.
The synthetic DNA will be added to a test tube of bacteria and the team hopes that one or more microbes starts moving, metabolising and multiplying.
The Canadian ETC Group, which tracks developments in biotechnology, believes that this development is more significant than the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago.
On Wednesday, ETC spokesman Jim Thomas called on the world's patent offices to reject the applications. He said: "These monopoly claims signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesise and privatise synthetic life forms. Will Venter's company become the 'Microbesoft' of synthetic biology?"
A colleague, Pat Mooney, said: "For the first time, God has competition. Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn't even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life."
However, Dr Venter did ask a panel of experts to examine the implications of creating synthetic life. His institute convened a bioethics committee to see if its plans were likely to raise objections.
The committee had no objections but pointed out that scientists must take responsibility for any impact their new organisms had if they got out of the lab. The organisms can be designed to die as soon as they leave laboratory conditions.
Dr Venter announced the project to build a synthetic life form in 2002. In theory, by adding functionalised synthetic DNA, the bacterium could be instructed to produce plastics, drugs or fuels.
Dr Venter's institute claims that its stripped-down microbe could be the key to cheap energy production. The patent application claims an organism that can make either hydrogen or ethanol for industrial fuels.
Source : www.theage.com.au
0 comments:
Post a Comment