I encourage people to read the one-page summary and at least the section headings in the full article.
To answer a few question that have come up:
How did they synthesize the genome? By creating short sequences of DNA and joining them together step by step to make larger sequences. They chemically synthesized short DNA sequences and assembled them into 1.4 thousand base pair (kbp) fragments. Five fragments were assembled into 7 kbp cassettes, which were assembled in yeast to generate 1/8 chunks of the genome, and these chunks were assembled in yeast to create the full genome. (See figure 2.) To try out deletions, they could replace a 1/8 chunk, rather than synthesizing the whole genome.
Why can't they delete all the non-essential genes? Bacterial have a lot of redundant genes, where two different genes provide the same essential function. Just like redundant disks, you can remove one, but not all of them. And you'll get different of minimal genomes depending on which gene you keep.
One interesting thing is that because the growth medium provides almost all the necessary nutrients, they could remove a lot of the metabolic genes, but needed to keep a lot of genes to transport molecules across the cell membrane. You can imagine a minimal cell constructed the opposite way.
To answer a few question that have come up:
How did they synthesize the genome? By creating short sequences of DNA and joining them together step by step to make larger sequences. They chemically synthesized short DNA sequences and assembled them into 1.4 thousand base pair (kbp) fragments. Five fragments were assembled into 7 kbp cassettes, which were assembled in yeast to generate 1/8 chunks of the genome, and these chunks were assembled in yeast to create the full genome. (See figure 2.) To try out deletions, they could replace a 1/8 chunk, rather than synthesizing the whole genome.
Why can't they delete all the non-essential genes? Bacterial have a lot of redundant genes, where two different genes provide the same essential function. Just like redundant disks, you can remove one, but not all of them. And you'll get different of minimal genomes depending on which gene you keep.
One interesting thing is that because the growth medium provides almost all the necessary nutrients, they could remove a lot of the metabolic genes, but needed to keep a lot of genes to transport molecules across the cell membrane. You can imagine a minimal cell constructed the opposite way.
The article doesn't mention that in their first synthetic bacterium (2010), they encoded text (actually HTML!) in the DNA to provide a secret watermark. See http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-se...