Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life

Enzymes Built from Scratch

David Baker and his colleagues at the University of Washington focused on a reaction that would break certain bonds between carbon atoms. The ability to design enzymes that can break and make carbon-carbon bonds could potentially enable scientists to break down environmental toxins, manufacture drugs, and create new fuels.

Source: Technology Review.

Mankind’s secrets kept in lunar ark

IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

According to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agency’s research department, the first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015.

“Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of Noah’s ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere,” said Foing.

Tulips are ideal because they can be frozen, transported long distances and grown with little nourishment. Combined with algae, an enclosed artificial atmosphere and chemically enhanced lunar soil, they could form the basis of an ecosystem.

Read the entire article at Times Online. See also “‘Lunar Ark’ Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth” on National Geographic.

Noah’s Arctic ark for seeds set to open

If much of civilization is ever wiped out, at least our seeds will survive.

The first specimens — 7,000 seeds from 36 African nations — have shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository in the Arctic Circle being built to store a safety copy of vital agricultural information, in case disaster should befall us.

Source: Live Science via MSNBC.

Darpa Pursues Neuroscience To Enhance Analyst, Soldier Performance

In a summary of her programs at the annual DarpaTech conference in 2005, Kruse spelled out the importance of the work: “The operational environment will continue to become more crowded with information, so it is clear that our war fighters must be able to manage complex situations with faster, more accurate and more concentrated cognitive capabilities. This means that issues such as cognitive overload, fatigue and decision-making under stress are fast becoming crucial factors in performance.”

The latest project Kruse has been working on is the Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA) program. This effort builds on an earlier one titled Augmentated Cognition, or AugCog. One of the leading contractors on both efforts has been Honeywell.

Source: Aviation Week.

Telepathic Genes

Scientists have discovered that genes have the ability to recognize similarities in each other from a distance and without other biological molecules aiding in the process. The unique discovery may help explain how similar genes group together and perform key processes involved in evolution.

Source: Astrobio.net

Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet

The research team, led by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, ordered short strands of genetic code from commercial DNA synthesis companies in the U.S. and Germany and stitched them into longer and longer strands using standard molecular biology techniques. To assemble the largest pieces of DNA, they inserted them into yeast cells and exploited a natural process called “homologous recombination,” which is used by yeast to repair damaged DNA. The experiment’s final product is equivalent to the naturally occurring genetic code of M. genitalium, with two minor exceptions: The scientists disabled the gene that gave the bug power to infect human cells, and they added a few “watermarks,” short strips of signature genetic code that identify the product as man-made.

Source: Scientific American.

Tiny Robot Walks Using Rat Heart Muscle

Scientists in Korea have designed a crablike robot that is smaller than the thickness of a fingernail and powered by contractions of cardiac tissue.

Source: Discover Magazine.

Human embryos cloned from adult cells

A California company has brought human cloning research to a new level with efficient production of cloned human blastocysts — an early stage of embryos.

The company, Stemagen in La Jolla in California, hopes that its achievement will be the first step towards using cloning techniques for biomedical research and, potentially, therapy. But first they will need to go the next step — using such blastocysts to establish self-propagating lines of embryonic stem cells that, as clones, would be genetically identical to a patient.

Source: Nature and BBC.

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

Source: Washington Post.