Homo synthetical
Is the world ready to create artificial life?
Ilya Khel, Hi-News
Last week, a group of 150 invited experts gathered at Harvard (What does it mean for researchers, journalists and the public when secret surrounds science?). Behind closed doors, they discussed the prospects of designing and building an entire human genome from scratch, using only a computer, a DNA synthesizer and raw materials. Then an artificial genome will be inserted into a living human cell to replace its natural DNA. It is hoped that the cell will "reboot", change its biological processes to work based on the instructions provided by artificial DNA.
In other words, we may soon see the first "artificial human cell."
But the goal is not just to create Human 2.0. Within the framework of this project, "HGP-Write: Testing Large Synthetic Genomes in Cells", scientists hope to develop the latest and powerful tools that will push synthetic biology to exponential growth on an industrial scale. If successful, we will not only acquire biological tools for designing humans as a species: we will get the opportunity to remake the living world.
Creating Life
Synthetic biology is, in fact, a marriage between the principles of engineering and biotechnology. If DNA sequencing is devoted to reading DNA, genetic engineering is devoted to editing DNA, and synthetic biology is devoted to programming new DNA, regardless of its original source, in order to create new forms of life.
Synthetic biologists see DNA and genes as standard biological building blocks that can be used as they please to create and modify living cells.
There is a concept of a designer in this field, says Dr. Jay Kisling, a pioneer of synthetic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. "When your hard drive dies, you can go to the nearest computer store, buy a new one, replace the old one," he says. – Why don't we use biological parts in the same way?" (in the article What does it mean for researchers, journalists and the public when secret surrounds science?, published on the website of The Conversation – VM).
To accelerate progress in this area, Kiesling and his colleagues are collecting a database of standardized parts of DNA – which is called BioBricks ("bio-bricks"). It can be used as puzzle elements and collect genetic material hitherto unseen in nature.
For Kisling and others in this field, synthetic biology is like developing a new programming language. Cells are hardware, "hardware", whereas DNA is the software that allows them to work. With enough knowledge of how genes work, synthetic biologists hope that they will be able to write genetic programs from scratch, create new organisms, change nature and even direct human evolution in a new direction.
Like genetic engineering, synthetic biology gives scientists the opportunity to experiment with natural DNA. The difference is in scale: Gene editing is a "cut/paste" process that adds new genes or changes letters in existing genes. Sometimes they don't change that much.
Synthetic biology, on the other hand, creates genes from scratch. This gives scientists more opportunities to make changes to known genes or even to create their own. The possibilities are almost limitless.
Biomedicaments, biofuels, bio-crops
The explosion of synthetic biology over the past ten years has already produced results that have delighted both scientists and corporations. Back in 2003, Kiesling published one of the very first studies proving and demonstrating the power of this approach. It was dedicated to a chemical called artemisinin, a powerful antimalarial drug extracted from sweet wormwood (annual wormwood).
Despite numerous attempts to cultivate this plant, its yield remains extremely low.
Kiesling realized that synthetic biology offers a way to bypass the harvesting process altogether. By introducing the necessary genes into bacterial cells, he reasoned, it is possible to turn these cells into machines for the production of artemisinin and provide a new abundant source of the drug at their expense.
It was very difficult to do this. Scientists needed to build a completely new pathway of metabolism in the cell, allowing it to process chemicals that it had not previously known. By trial and error, scientists have glued together dozens of genes from several organisms into one DNA package. By installing this package into E. coli – the E. coli bacterium is commonly used in the laboratory to produce chemicals – they created a new pathway for the bacterium that allowed it to secrete artemisinin.
By tightening the necessary nuts a little more, Kisling and his team managed to increase production by a million times and reduce the price of the drug tenfold.
Artemisinin was only the first step in a huge program. This preparation is a hydrocarbon belonging to a family of molecules often used for the manufacture of biofuels. Why not apply the same process to biofuel production? By replacing the genes that bacteria used to produce artemisinin with genes for the production of biofuel hydrocarbons, scientists have already made many microbes that turn sugar into fuel.
The agricultural sector is another industry that can benefit enormously from synthetic biology. Theoretically, we could take the genes responsible for nitrogen fixation in bacteria, put them in the cells of our cultures and completely change their natural growth process. With the right combination of genes, we could grow a crop with a full range of nutrients that requires less water, land, energy and fertilizers.
Synthetic biology could be applied to the production of completely new foods, for example, perfumes through the fermentation of modified yeast or vegan cheeses and other dairy products created without the help of animals.
"We need to reduce carbon emissions and harmful substances, use less land and water, fight pests and increase soil fertility," says Dr. Pamela Ronald, professor at the University of California, Davis. Synthetic biology can provide us with the right tools.
Recreating life
Aside from the practice! One of the ultimate goals of synthetic biology is to create a synthetic organism made exclusively from specially developed DNA.
The main obstacle now is technology. DNA synthesis is currently very expensive, slow and prone to errors. Most existing methods allow you to make a DNA chain 200 letters long; ordinary genes are ten times longer. The human genome contains about 20,000 genes that produce proteins. But over the past ten years, the cost of DNA synthesis has been declining rapidly.
According to Dr. Drew Andy, a geneticist at Stanford University, the cost of sequencing a single letter has dropped from $4 in 2003 to 3 cents today. The estimated cost of printing all 3 billion letters of the human genome is currently $90 million, but it is expected to fall to $100,000 within 20 years if the trend remains at the same level.
In the 90s, Craig Venter, known for his leading role in sequencing the human genome, began looking for the minimum set of genes needed to create life. Together with colleagues from the Institute of Genomic Research, Venter removed genes from the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium to identify life-critical ones.
In 2008, Venter pieced together these "critical genes" and assembled a new "minimal" genome from a broth of chemicals using DNA synthesis.
A few years later, Venter transplanted an artificial genome into a second bacterium. The genes took root and "restarted" the cell, allowing it to grow and reproduce itself – it was the first organism with a completely artificial genome.
From bacteria to humans
If the new venture receives funding, it will repeat Venter's experiments using our own genome. Given that the human genome is about 5,000 times larger than the Venter bacteria, it's hard to say how much more complicated such a synthesis can be.
Even if nothing works out, the industry will gain valuable experience. According to Dr. George Church, a leading geneticist at Harvard Medical School, this project could unlock technological advances that will improve our own ability to synthesize long strands of DNA. Church even emphasizes that the main goal of the project is the development of technology.
However, the meeting of scientists caused a lot of skeptical comments. Be that as it may, this project may one day lead to the creation of "designer babies" or even people. The parents of such people may be computers. It is easy to imagine such a future, but it is frightening: how safe is it to directly manipulate life or create it? Who will own this technology? What to do with a life that turned out to be unsuccessful? Won't all this create discrimination and inequality?
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
26.05.2016