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Open wetware - Life 2.0

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~Sophia~

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I thought this was cool so I am going to share.

Dr. Tom Knight from MIT, inspired by Lego, invented an idea of "BioBricks". A Biobrick is a strand of DNA - a combination of genes (which when translated will produce certain specific function) equiped with universal connectors at each end, which then can be linked with other such DNA building blocks. The idea is to develop a standardised set of parts very much like open software modules. A biologist will be able to go to a catalog, find a component with the right parameters/function and order it from a supplier. He won't need to design it himself or even know how it works in detail. At the moment, Biobricks are still a toy but there are already a lot of them arround in the public domain. Another researcher Dr. Craig Venter is already working on developing a "mimimal genome" - the smallest set of genes consistent with life (in a lab) with which Bioblocks could be further used to build higher level biological structures. He is working on virus and bacterial genomes currently but says more complex genomes, of the sort that make a plant, animals, and fungi, will be possible within a decade.

One of the leading proponents of this method is Dr. Jay Keasling. He persuaded the Gates Foundation to back his idea for making antimalarial drug called Artemisinin cheaply using synthetic biology (at the moment it is a herbal remedy - extraction of which is so complicated that it is impractical). So, Dr. Keasling has build an artificial metabilic pathway using various genes which makes yeast produce a chemical derivative easily converted to Artemisinin. Cool, ha!

So far, surprisingly, the media and thus general public has shown little interest in this technology (a good thing imo).

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Another researcher Dr. Craig Venter is already working on developing a "mimimal genome" - the smallest set of genes consistent with life (in a lab) with which Bioblocks could be further used to build higher level biological structures. He is working on virus and bacterial genomes currently but says more complex genomes, of the sort that make a plant, animals, and fungi, will be possible within a decade.

Craig Venter is one of my favorite scientists. He was able to unite his inventions with bussiness success and thus he earned a lot of money while hugely contributing to unraveling of human genom. There is a great book about it.

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