About 18-24months ago I went through a phase of listening to geneticists talks/conferences/podcasts for an hour or two a day during long runs, it’s so far outside my wheelhouse I’m probably mixing things up, but I thought I recalled cutting edge experiments using synthetic cells to create artificial life (a worm perhaps with a relatively simple DNA, maybe even a modified DNA further simplifying the genome to the furthest extent possible still resulting in life) with one of the goals of understanding the exact functions of all the genes in this “simple” DNA. Again I’m probably mixing up multiple discussions and studies into one, but I would have been very surprised if the function of every single gene in the human genome was known and understood, as suggested by the title.
I worked with mycoplasma genitalium which is a "minimal" organism- an extremely small number of genes, nearly all of which appear to be absolutely required for viability. It's sort of a unit test for model biology, except it grows so slowly it's more like an integration test in terms of performance.
This expert from the first link is very likely what I was poorly trying to regurgitate:
> Mgen still has the smallest genome of any known (naturally occurring) self-replicating organism and thus is often the organism of choice in minimal genome research. The synthetic genome of Mgen named Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0 (after the research centre, J. Craig Venter Institute, where it was synthesised) was produced in 2008, becoming the first organism with a synthetic genome.
> The work in this area is quite extraordinary, but typically gets much less attention than anything that works with human genomes.
In fairness laymen like me would just get us all mixed up with a worm genome anyway ;). In my defense I’m just a lawyer that likes to listen to foreign topics I find interesting while I run, but it is nice to confirm I have good instincts, because I really did find this work to be extraordinary and fascinating.
Well, depending on how broad your definition of life is, viruses have the most stripped down genomes of all. In the smallest viruses, with genomes of just under 10kb in length, nearly every basepair is dedicated to either infection or replication. In fact, they are often so compact that open reading frames are interleaved, in order to provide more functionality without increasing size.
Scientists often refer to viruses as "obligate", in order to sidestep the question of what is life, as most have no interest in the topics which occupy philosophers. In any case, they are non-cell based, for whatever that is worth. I imagine in a non-hostile environment, even the infection functional would be shed, and you would be left with just replication, which is the fundamental component beyond which no further reduction in complexity can be made.
> I imagine in a non-hostile environment, even the infection functional would be shed, and you would be left with just replication
A virus replicates by infecting another cell and taking over its actual replication infrastructure, so getting rid of infection gets rid of replication too.
> viruses have the most stripped down genomes of all
Giant viruses can have over 1M basepairs, substantially larger than a bacteria such as Mycoplasma genitalium, with substantial functionality (pretty much everything except the ribosome in at least some of them: https://www.virology.ws/2018/03/08/only-the-ribosome-is-lack...)
> I recalled cutting edge experiments using synthetic cells to create artificial life (a worm perhaps with a relatively simple DNA, maybe even a modified DNA further simplifying the genome to the furthest extent possible still resulting in life)
A worm seems super-complex for something like that. I'd guess they'd actually use a bacterium.
I thought some work on it made HN, but can't seem to find the article, about a research group that was continuing to strip things out and then test viability.
I wish I could be more helpful, but this was during a period I was distance running everyday for years without much concern on what I was consuming so long as I found it interesting.
In terms of popular podcasts maybe I could say Lex Friedman, but then I might search for one of his guests, or specific topics I wanted to learn more about, on YouTube and look for lectures or panel discussions in the results that looked like they might be high quality.
