BBC: A step closer to 'synthetic life'

[steven johnson]

Get ready for Franken-life. I hope it likes me.

(No offense intended, Sen. Franken.)

In what has been described as a step towards the creation of a synthetic cell, scientists have created a new "engineered" strain of bacteria.

A team successfully transferred the genome of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it, and then transplanted into another bacterium.

This paves the way to the creation of a synthetic organism - inserting a human-made genome into a bacterial cell.

"Bacteria have 'immune' systems that protect them from foreign DNA such as those from viruses," he explained ... managed to disable this immune system,



A step closer to 'synthetic life'