Mycoplasma laboratorium

Mycoplasma laboratorium is a designed, partially synthetic species of bacterium derived from the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. This effort in synthetic biology is being undertaken at the J. Craig Venter Institute by a team of approximately 20 scientists headed by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, and including DNA researcher Craig Venter and microbiologist Clyde A. Hutchison III. Mycoplasma genitalium was chosen as it was the species with the smallest number of genes known at that time.

On May 21, 2010, Science reported that the Venter group had successfully synthesized the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides from a computer record, and transplanted the synthesized genome into the existing cell of a Mycoplasma capricolum bacterium that had had its DNA removed. The "synthetic" bacterium was viable, i.e. capable of replicating billions of times. (The team had originally planned to use the M. genitalium bacterium they had previously been working with, but switched to M. mycoides because the latter bacterium grows much faster, which translated into quicker experiments.) Scientists who were not involved in the study caution that it is not a truly synthetic life form because its genome was put into an existing cell.

It is estimated that the synthetic genome cost US$40 million to make and took 20 people more than a decade of work. Despite the controversy, Venter has attracted over $110 million in investments so far for Synthetic Genomics, with a future deal with Exxon Mobil of $300 million in research to design algae for diesel fuel.

Mycoplasma genitalium was chosen as it was the species with the smallest number of genes known at that time.

Mycoplasma is a genus of bacteria of the class Mollicutes in the division Tenericutes, characterised by the lack of a cell wall (making it Gram negative) due to their parasitic or commensal lifestyle (extracellular and intracellular). In molecular biology, the genus has received much attention. Apart from being a notorious and hard to eradicate (immune to beta-lactam and other antibiotics) contaminant in mammalian cell cultures, it has also been used as a model organism: the second published complete bacterial genome sequence was that of Mycoplasma genitalium, which has one of the smallest genomes of free-living organisms. The M. pneumoniae genome sequence was published soon afterward and was the first genome sequence determined by primer walking of a cosmid library instead of the whole-genome shotgun method. Consequently, this species was chosen as a model for the minimal cell project, catalog the entire protein content of a cell.

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