Scientists Created Bacteria With a Synthetic Genome. Is This Artificial Life?


According to a report by Gizmodo, scientists have created a new variant of the E. coli bacteria using an entirely synthetic genome. Building and replacing the large entire genome was just one of the team’s reported goals, they also hope the resulting bacteria would use a reduced number of possible DNA base pair combinations in order to produce the 20 amino acids. Gizmodo reports that the now-obsolete sequences could be used to produce never-before-seen amino acids and proteins. The intention of the project wasn’t just to rebuild a bacteria’s genetic code, but to simplify redundancies in order to have more genetic code to work with in order to create custom genomes.

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