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{bio,medical} informatics

Monday, March 24, 2003

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MIT Technology Review Life Made to Order

"But now a small group of researchers are looking to a far more ambitious goal than simply reading the sequence of genetic material: they are attempting to write entirely new genomes from scratch. In essence, they hope to create new synthetic forms of life, the likes of which have never before existed, by painstakingly spelling out exact sequences of DNA that hold all the instructions for the new organisms.

It is biotech's most brazen attempt, so far, to play God. So the fact that Craig Venter, the legendary self-aggrandizing visionary of genomics, is leading the charge should come as no surprise."

redux [11.26.02]
The Scientist Minimal controversy
[requires 'free' registration]

"Craig Venter's "minimal genome" project announced Wednesday is not about creating a new life form and probably doesn't pose much of a biowarfare threat, researchers say. The high-profile project was just funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) with $3 million going to the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), one of the non-profit research institutes Venter founded after leaving the newly profit-minded Celera Genomics early this year.

According to some scientists, the new project won't even define the minimal genomethe basic gene set required for lifebecause there can be no single minimal genome."

Astrobiology Magazine Life from Scratch?
"Several years ago, Venter first looked at this mycoplasma as the best such model, because the organism is a record-holder of sorts: the self-replicating life form with the smallest known complement of genetic material. Unlike the human genome with its 30,000 to 50,000 genes, M. genitalium gets by with only 517. But remarkably, nearly half of even that minimal set is extra baggage. Under some laboratory conditions, as few as 300 of the genes can fulfill its definition as a lifeform that feeds and divides.

As it turns out, what is the definition of life itself? and also exactly what is its minimal genetic set? have been hotly contested. Gene size is one of the main limits to what could be the final and minimal cell size, and thus may set a limit on possible targets for creating life from scratch.

But what structures are too small or too simple to be considered "life"?"

[ rhetoric ]

“Bioinformatics will be at the core of biology in the 21st century. In fields ranging from structural biology to genomics to biomedical imaging, ready access to data and analytical tools are fundamentally changing the way investigators in the life sciences conduct research and approach problems. Complex, computationally intensive biological problems are now being addressed and promise to significantly advance our understanding of biology and medicine. No biological discipline will be unaffected by these technological breakthroughs.”

BIOINFORMATICS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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