Resistant to all viruses in the world. This will be an artificial bacterium created by American scientists. Their next step is a synthetic human cell, perfected of course. Will the vision from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner come true?
Science magazine reports that George Church’s team at Harvard Medical School in Boston wants to “reprogram” Eschrichia coli DNA so that it is different from the DNA of all organisms inhabiting Earth. This means making over 62000 changes to the bacterial genome. Such large changes could not be made using classical methods – it was necessary to design the genome on a computer and synthesize the DNA fragment by fragment (each of them was about 2000 base pairs). The short sections were then merged into longer sections – around 50 bases each, with the target of the genome being 000 million bases.
Remarkable Escherichia coli
First, however, scientists will test the operation of individual segments of a synthetic bacterium by integrating them into the genomes of living bacteria and deleting the corresponding sequence. So far, 13 bugs resulting in killing bacteria have been found and fixed; the work may be finished within a few months.
It will not be the first artificial bacterium (as already “constructed” by the team from the Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla), but their genome was extremely simplified. However, the synthetic, modified E. Cola is a much more complicated project.
It is supposed to be better than ordinary E. coli in many respects: resistant to all viruses, unable to exchange genes with other organisms and producing proteins that are not found in nature.
Regular proteins are made of 20 natural amino acids. In the case of an improved bacterium, they would also contain four synthetic amino acids. Importantly, without one of them, it would not be able to develop, so it should not cause problems if it was released into the wild.
Trade in bacteria disabled
The finished synthetic bacterium would be freely available to other researchers. Companies could also use it on the basis of a license – but none would be exclusive.
Genetically modified microorganisms – with the addition of a single gene – first appeared in the 70s. Thanks to them, it was possible, for example, to produce insulin identical to human insulin in appropriate quantities. Now you can insert or modify dozens of genes, allowing bacteria to produce a wide variety of products – saffron, vanilla flavor, anti-malarial drugs and even morphine.
However, there has always been a risk that the drastically modified organisms would get out of the factories or exchange genes with wild relatives. What if a bacterium that produces a potent drug had lodged in the human gut?
In turn, viruses could infect vats of bacteria and cause huge losses in the production plant. In the case of a synthetic bacterium, any attempt to use its cellular machinery to create copies of the virus would fail.
100 million for the human genome
In the future, Church would like to obtain animal and human stem cells that are resistant to all types of viruses. They could find application in the production of vaccines and in transplantation. However, it will be very difficult. The human genome is approximately 6 billion base pairs, while the E. coli genome is only 4 million.
However, a group of biologists associated with Church wants to raise $ 100 million to synthesize the entire human genome (Human Genome Project-Write). Initially, an unmodified genome is to be created, but the implementation of the project should provide the basis for human modification. The consequences of these modifications are currently difficult to predict.