Loki wrote:
NephyrS wrote:
Calling it 'creating a synthetic cell' is a bit of a stretch, seeing as they simply injected DNA into an already existing cell.
The creation of a functioning and replicating DNA hybrid is interesting, but far from creating a synthetic cell.
And honestly, it's not that far from what people have been doing for a long time, modifying the DNA of bacterial cells to produce a specific byproduct (fuel, etc) by hybridizing other DNA sequences into it.
Yeah, but they built the DNA entirely from scratch. Which is pretty neat.
It is neat, but it is also something the group has done before, some two years ago. It's quite interesting, given that the DNA sequenced was in total around 580,000 BP. Thankfully, it was a bacterial genome, so there was no worry about structural DNA for coiling.
The papers were neat, and I've read them- I just get ticked off about 'public science' reporting that portrays developments as something completely different than what they are in the context of the groups actual work.