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.
You are probably referring to Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0 ( (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_genitalium) as worms are too complex to be minimialized
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium
The work in this area is quite extraordinary, but typically gets much less attention than anything that works with human genomes.