Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, the same group that had built a fully synthetic bacterial genome, set out to strip that genome down to its essentials, using gene-disruption data to decide which genes the cell could live without.
After three rounds of design, synthesis and testing, the team arrived at a genome of 473 genes, the smallest known to support an independently self-replicating cell, built from a synthetic version of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. Roughly a third of those remaining genes still have no known function.
The minimal cell divides more slowly and looks visibly different under a microscope from its unmodified relative, a reminder that stripped-down does not mean identical. That a third of essential genes remain unexplained shows how much of basic cell biology is still unmapped, even in one of the simplest cells ever built. The minimal genome is now used as a stripped-down chassis for engineering new synthetic organisms.
Read the original study
Hutchison et al., Science, 2016 · doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253
Life's minimum parts list has 473 entries.
Source
- Hutchison, C. A., Chuang, R.-Y., Noskov, V. N., Assad-Garcia, N., Deerinck, T. J., Ellisman, M. H., Gill, J., Kannan, K., Karas, B. J., Ma, L., Pelletier, J. F., Qi, Z.-Q., Richter, R. A., Strychalski, E. A., Sun, L., Suzuki, Y., Tsvetanova, B., Wise, K. S., Smith, H. O., . . . Venter, J. C. (2016). Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Science, 351(6280), aad6253. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253