The story of Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0

Abstract

Perhaps best known as the genomics pioneer who defied all the odds to decode the book of life and publish its contents years ahead of the government funded Human Genome Project's pro-jected completion date; J. Craig Venter has done it again—this time in the nascent field of synthetic biology. In the May issue of Sciencexpress, Venter (an associate editor on BioBugs) and colleagues (including John Glass—also a mem-ber of the BioBugs editorial board) reported the design, synthesis and assembly of Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 1 —the first bacterial cell to contain a completely synthetic genome, and as such the first citizen of synthetic biology. The story which led to the development of JCVI-syn1.0 has its origins as far back as 1995, when Venter and his team pub-lished the sequence of Mycoplasma genitalium. 2 A pathogen iso-lated from the epithelia of primate genital and respiratory tracts; M. genitalium possesses one of the smallest genomes of any free-living organism and, as such, represented the perfect target genome to recreate. Of the 485 genes encoded by the ~600,000 bp M. genitalium genome, approximately 100 were found to be non-essential—suggesting a minimal genome size of ~400 genes. To confirm that this did, in fact, constitute the minimum requirement for life, Venter and co-workers first had to synthesise the minimal genome, and then transplant it into a recipient cell to 'boot-up—two steps which had never before been achieved in the laboratory. The first breakthrough came in 2007, when the team finally cracked the chromosomal transplantation step. 3