New life.....or not

The US-based scientists have "stitched" together 381 genes, based on the DNA sequence of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, a parasitic organism which can cause urinary tract infections.
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Nice going, guys. :mad:
 
How about stitching something together that can cure heart disease or something like that?
 
Schneibster said:
It's not nonsense. The cards have been on the table a long time. It's fairly impressive.

Good question. I believe the correct answer is, "Yes." ;)
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I guess what I was asking is it really "life" if it cant metabolise or reproduce?
 
Wow, really interesting article. Thanks for sharing this.

Didn’t Carl Sagan once say that his definition of life was any item or collection of items that resisted a tenancy toward entropy, or became more organized over time? Something about how this would help us properly identify “life” in the universe, given that we can assume most properties of life on early may not be universal... so maybe that’s a good definition for artificial life as well?
 
Not quite sure what you mean. It's a bacterium. Are you asking if bacteria are alive? Most biologists think so. You might find some controversy about virii.

As a bacterium, it can consume food, excrete waste, respirate, and divide it self to reproduce. I think you might have misconstrued the fact that it requires a particular environment to survive; most bacteria do. That's why you can kill them with Clorox.
 
It doesn't appear from the news report that the bacterium is able to reproduce at all, which would seem to be essential for it to be called "life".

Here the PNAS article for anyone who is interested in figuring out whether the bacterium can reproduce.
 
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bokonon said:
Is it true that mules can't reproduce?
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There is a tricky line to be walked here. Yes, mules are alive; and no, mules generally can't reproduce. However, self-replication still remains an important, while not necessarily defining, aspect of life. The lack of self-replication is often used to explain why viruses and prions aren't considered to be alive.
 
bokonon said:
Is it true that mules can't reproduce?
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Yes, mules can't reproduce because they are hybrids... this thing can reproduce... but it didn't make it's a starter cell from scratch... it's a stitched together chromosome-- it depends on how you want to define life... but this is a "clone" of sorts-- a bacterial clone and the DNA that was stitched together replicates inside a cell the same way normal DNA would. They just didn't make the cell wall (container) from scratch--just the info. I think it's pretty big. I thought this was still a couple of years down the road from what I'd read recently... it's pretty cool... it means you could take the DNA out of a bacteria and insert the DNA you wanted to turn the bacteria into a little replication factory of your synthesized clones. Sure these bacteria aren't the best-- they're simple... good for practice. But there are many useful bacterias... and there is hope that we can synthesize some which will deal with our excess carbon waste one day soon as part of a solution towards global warming. One step forward.
 
One nice thing about this particular organism is that it represents just about the minimal genome capable of sustaining bacterial life. Therefore, its characteristics provide targets for putative antibiotics capable of killing it. We don't have really good antibiotics to use against mycoplasmas, and since one of them causes pneumonia, that could be useful.
 
mijopaalmc said:
It doesn't appear from the news report that the bacterium is able to reproduce at all, which would seem to be essential for it to be called "life".

Here the PNAS article for anyone who is interested in figuring out whether the bacterium can reproduce.
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That was my point, but I also take the point about viruses (I think this is now the acceptable plural, not to be pedantic).
 
The news report is incorrect. It is capable of reproducing, and consumption and excretion. It is a parasite, taking its food from its host; that means it is incapable of surviving except inside a host.

At the bottom of the second page of the PNAS article, see the following sentence:
"We isolated 169 colonies and sub-colonies having different insertions sites from their parental colonies with Tn4001tet inserted at base pair 517,751, which is in MG414. " It's kind of hard to have parents, much less parental colonies, unless reproduction is happening.
 
Schneibster said:
The news report is incorrect. It is capable of reproducing, and consumption and excretion. It is a parasite, taking its food from its host; that means it is incapable of surviving except inside a host.

At the bottom of the second page of the PNAS article, see the following sentence:
"We isolated 169 colonies and sub-colonies having different insertions sites from their parental colonies with Tn4001tet inserted at base pair 517,751, which is in MG414. " It's kind of hard to have parents, much less parental colonies, unless reproduction is happening.
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Thanks for the clarification. Surely this must be one of the science stories of the decade. How long do you think it will be until a bacterium is manufactured which survives outside a host?
 
Sure. That one was pretty small and simple. It's likely to take a while before they can make anything bigger. A few years, perhaps, maybe not quite that long, but close.
 
Mijo said:
There is a tricky line to be walked here. Yes, mules are alive; and no, mules generally can't reproduce. However, self-replication still remains an important, while not necessarily defining, aspect of life. The lack of self-replication is often used to explain why viruses and prions aren't considered to be alive.
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Perhaps we need to distinguish between an organism that cannot reproduce in principle, and one whose reproductive system is broken.

~~ Paul
 
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