minimal bacterial genome paper > notes
Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Hutchison III et al., 2016.
A paper was recently published describing the construction of a bacterial cell with a minimal genome that is capable of autonomus growth under lab conditions. This cell, which is based on mycoplasma mycoides, has the smallest genome and least number of genes of all known cellular life. This work has implications for synthetic biology and our understanding of life and comes after decades of study trying to find the 'core' genes required for life.
You can think of the genome to be a big black box of unknowns filled with apparent redundancy by millions of years of evolution. Once you know what genes are essential to live then you have a biological defintion of life and then by building upon these genes you can streamline synthetic biology processes without 'non-essential' genes getting in the way. Or alternatively you can use this organism as a tool to ask biological questions. This represents the field of genomics moving out of the descriptive phase and into the true interogative phase backed by powerful synthetic biology. Genome editing may even be seen as a stopgap in functional genomics.
On the whole, the paper describes the failure to design a living cell with a minimal genome from first principles but through random gene knockout by transposon mutagenesis they were able to iteratively generate a minimal genome capable of life successfully. Through this work the group helps in our understanding of the genome and defines essential, quasi-essential and non-essential genes. They even come across functional redundancy. The big interesting thing about the work is that many of the genes found in the minimal genome had no described function.
Of course there's a big difference between lab life and real life but as I said before this organism can be used for synthetic biology experiments in applied or basic research settings. But will this minimal cell be able to compete the biosynthetic leaders such as the yeast or streptomyces? I'm sure you can expect imporovements to this organisam, alterntaive synthetic prokaryotes, single-celled eukaryotes and even mammalian cellular life.
