Scientists who seek to imitate living cells say they can’t help but be
perpetually dazzled by the genuine articles, their flexibility, their
versatility, their childlike grandiosity. No matter what outrageous or
fattening things we may ask our synthetic cells to do, scientists say,
it’s nothing compared with what cells already have done of their own
accord, usually in the format of bacteria.

Mycoplasma Genitalium

When scientists announced on Jan. 24 that they had reconstituted the
complete set of genes for a microbe using just a few bottles of
chemicals, the feat was hailed as a kind of shining Nike moment in the
field of synthetic biology, the attempt to piece together living
organisms from inert scratch.

Reporting in the journal Science, Dr. J. Craig Venter
and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute said they had
fabricated the entire DNA chain of a microbial parasite called
Mycoplasma genitalium, exceeding previous records of sustained DNA
synthesis by some 18-fold. Any day now, the researchers say, they will
pop that manufactured mortal coil into a cellular shell, where the
genomic code will “boot up,” as Dr. Venter puts it, and the entire
construct will begin acting like a natural-born M. genitalium — minus
the capacity, the researchers promise, to infect the delicate tissues
that explain the parasite’s surname.

Yet even as researchers
rhapsodize about gaining the power to custom-design organisms that will
supply us with rivers of cheap gasoline, better chemotherapeutic agents
or — here’s my latest fantasy — a year-round supply of fresh eggnog,
the most profound insights to emerge from the pursuit of synthetic life
just may be about real life.

Scientists who seek to imitate
living cells say they can’t help but be perpetually dazzled by the
genuine articles, their flexibility, their versatility, their childlike
grandiosity. No matter what outrageous or fattening things we may ask
our synthetic cells to do, scientists say, it’s nothing compared with
what cells already have done of their own accord, usually in the format
of bacteria. Microbes have been found to survive and even thrive in
places where if they had any sense they would freeze, melt, explode,
disintegrate, starve, suffocate, or at the very least file a very poor
customer review.

“We have micro-organisms that live in such
strong acid or base solutions that if you put your finger in, the skin
would dissolve almost instantly,” Dr. Venter said in an interview.
“There’s another organism that can take three million rads of radiation
and not be killed.” How can a microbe withstand a blast of
radioactivity that is a good 1,500 times greater than what would kill
any of us virtually on the spot? “Its chromosome gets blown apart,” Dr.
Venter said, “but it stitches everything back together and just starts
replicating again.”

Given the wealth of biological and
metabolic templates that nature has invented over nearly four billion
years of evolutionary tinkering, scientists say, any sane program to
synthesize new life forms must go hand in hand with a sustained
sampling of the old. “My view is that we know less than 1 percent of
what’s out there in the biological universe,” Dr. Venter said.

Last
year, he and his colleagues went prospecting for new organisms in the
deep midocean, long thought to be one of earth’s least animate regions.
Sure, life evolved in the seas, but shallow seas, where sunlight can
penetrate, were considered the preferred site for biodiversity. Even
with the startling discovery in the 1980s of life on the ocean floor,
around the hydrothermal vents, the midocean waters couldn’t shake their
reputation as an impoverished piece of real estate: too far down for solar energy, too high up for its geothermal equivalent.

Yet
when the Venter team began sampling the waters for the most basic
evidence of life, the presence of genetic material, they found
themselves practically awash in novel DNA. “From our random sequencing
in the ocean, we uncovered six million new genes,” he said, genes, that
is, unlike any yet seen in any of the mammals, reptiles, worms, fish,
insects, fungi, microbes or narcissists that have been genetically
analyzed so far. With just that first-pass act of nautical sequencing,
Dr. Venter said, “we doubled the number of all genes characterized to
date.”

Researchers assume that most of the novel DNA is
microbial in origin, but they have yet to identify the organisms or see
what they can do, because most microbes are notoriously difficult to
cultivate in the lab. Bacteria may happily swim through toxic waste,
but when it comes to confinement on an agar plate, thank you, they’d
rather be dead.

Technical challenges notwithstanding,
scientists have made some progress in investigating preposterous life
forms and tallying the biochemical tools that such extremophiles use.
Thermophilic microbes, for example, which can withstand temperatures of
238 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the boiling point of water, have
stiffening agents in their membranes, to keep them from melting away,
and they build their cell proteins with a different assortment of amino
acids than our cells do, allowing the construction of strongly bonded
protein chains that won’t collapse in the heat.

By contrast, said Steven K. Schmidt, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado
in Boulder, when you look at organisms that thrive in subzero
conditions, “their membranes are really loosey-goosey, very fluid,” and
so resist stiffening and freezing. It turns out there are a lot of
these loosey-gooses around. Dr. Schmidt and his colleagues study the
fridgophile life forms that make their home in glacial debris high in
the Andes Mountains, 20,000 feet above sea level, where the scene may
look bleak, beyond posthumous, but where, he said, “we’ve been pretty
amazed at the extreme diversity of things we’ve found.” The complexity
of the Andean microbial ecosystem, he said, “is greater than what you’d
find in your garden.”

Yes, microbes were here first, and
they’ve done everything first, and synthetic lifers are happy to
scavenge for parts and ideas. Drew Endy, an assistant professor in the
biological engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and his colleagues are putting together a registry of standardized
biological parts, which they call BioBrick parts. The registry consists
of the DNA code for different biological modules, interchangeable
protein parts that they hope may someday be pieced together into a wide
variety of biological devices to perform any task a bioengineer may
have in mind, rather like the way nuts, bolts, gears, pulleys, circuits
and the like are assembled into the machines of our civilization.
Numbering some 2,000 parts and growing, the registry contains many
recipes for clever protein modules invented by bacteria. One sequence
engineered by researchers in Melbourne, Australia, encodes the
instructions for a little protein balloon, for example. “It’s based on
a natural part found in a marine micro-organism that controls the
buoyancy of the cell,” Dr. Endy said.

Invisible though it may be, the microbial community ever keeps us afloat.

Via NY Times