They tried paring down a genome to its essential elements and failed. They then combined their designed genome with bits and pieces cut out from the larger, original genome, mixing and matching parts until they found the smallest subset of "parts" needed to run a fully self-replicating cell. The closest CS equivalent is that this was a kind of genetic algorithm with a focus on making a small codebase that minimally accomplishes replication, starting from a set of known-to-work pieces of code.
Open questions remaining:
- They found 149 genes of unclear function that were required to enable replication, what do those genes do?
- If you make a cell this way, how good is it at surviving? In culture, many model systems (yeast, e. coli) outcompete everything in the media by being faster at reproducing themselves (among other strategies). If these cells barely reproduce, other contaminating cells will go faster, making these minimal cells not very good for actual synthetic biology tasks without further modification (maybe they make a toxin while being immune themselves).
Last I heard many of the GUFs are small integral membrane proteins, so the running theory is that they need to be there (and in quantities) to maintain isotonic homeostasis for the cell. The hard to test but interesting question is whether, though they need to be there, that they are there is more important than what they are.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253
They tried paring down a genome to its essential elements and failed. They then combined their designed genome with bits and pieces cut out from the larger, original genome, mixing and matching parts until they found the smallest subset of "parts" needed to run a fully self-replicating cell. The closest CS equivalent is that this was a kind of genetic algorithm with a focus on making a small codebase that minimally accomplishes replication, starting from a set of known-to-work pieces of code.
Open questions remaining:
- They found 149 genes of unclear function that were required to enable replication, what do those genes do?
- If you make a cell this way, how good is it at surviving? In culture, many model systems (yeast, e. coli) outcompete everything in the media by being faster at reproducing themselves (among other strategies). If these cells barely reproduce, other contaminating cells will go faster, making these minimal cells not very good for actual synthetic biology tasks without further modification (maybe they make a toxin while being immune themselves).