Synthetic Minimal Cells and the Search for the Most Basic Life

How simplifying might enable us to better create the complex

Just 3 days ago there was an announcement in Nature declaring that the race for the most minimal was over. Craig Venter had succeeding in creating a cell with only 473 essential genes, ending a quest of 20 years to create the most basic living organism.

In comparison, E. coli has 4,000 to 5,000 genes. At only 531 kbp, the organism is based on Mycoplasma mycoides and has nearly all of its nutrient supplied through growth media. It’s become known as JCVI-syn3.0. While this is a fascinating achievement, it comes with a number of caveats for the field of synthetic biology that are a little disconcerting.

The first is that the organism is patented. Because they have tried to market this organism as completely synthetic, and the J. Craig Venter Institute wants to sell this organism as a platform and chassis for further development, syn3.0 has been submitted to the patent office. It is an extension on the patent filed in 2006 for Mycoplasma laboratorium, the initial organism that they developed.

The second is that there are 149 genes that are unknown in function. Seventy of them have potential analogs in the current understanding of protein function, but fully 79 are a complete mystery. That means that over 30% of the genes essential to the survival of an organism are an enigma.

The third is that there is a watermark hidden in the genome of the laboratory sequenced organism. This means that the coded signature of the developing company is placed in the actual sequence of “junk” DNA.

When taken together, all of these facts may not seem like much, but they herald the coming of a new age of organism development. Through the creation of an even smaller synthetic genome, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is in essence creating the most basic operating system of an organism. To make an analogy, what they are doing is creating the UNIX of biology. If they can get it down to the size of a normal plasmid (max 15 kbp), they will have succeeded in creating a system that will be essential for synthetic biology. It is only a matter of time before something like this happens. This will free up the industry to consider the higher-order DNA for the coding of very specific proteins in regards to function of the organism.

The entire reason the software community could flourish is that UNIX was a platform on which other OS development could occur. UNIX was initially a free and open source software platform on which many factories, government computing systems, university research laboratories, and companies built their software. Apple OS was built on top of UNIX and is now one of the most popular OS in the world.

In addition, the patenting and watermarking of organisms is deeply disturbing when considering the broader implications of such a practice. As a person who espouses many open source practices, DNA watermarks and patents put up barriers for the collective knowledge of the scientific community. The continued development of this kind of methodology may impede the DIYbio community later on.

All-in-all, the development of JCVI-syn3.0 is a recognizable success and pushes the field further, but there are certain aspects of it that make me worried about the ultimate trajectory of the research team from JCVI. By creating a proprietary OS for biological development, they may potentially limit the overall innovation of the synthetic biology community.