Opening the door to synthetic life

INNOVATION: It may be used to produce new fuels and create biotech drugs

Harvard University scientists are a step closer to creating synthetic forms of life, part of a drive to design man-made organisms that may one day be used to help produce new fuels and create biotechnology drugs.

Researchers led by George Church, whose findings helped spur the US human genome project in the 1980s, have copied the part of a living cell that makes proteins, the building blocks of life. The finding overcomes a major roadblock in making synthetic self-replicating organisms, Church said today in a lecture at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The technology can be used to program cells to make virtually any protein, even some that don’t exist in nature, the scientists said. That may allow production of helpful new drugs, chemicals and organisms, including living bacteria. It also opens the door to ethical concerns about creation of processes that may be uncontrollable by life’s natural defenses.

“It’s the key component to making synthetic life,” Church said yesterday in a telephone call with reporters. “We haven’t made synthetic life and it’s not our primary goal, but this is a huge milestone in that direction.”

The work may be immediately helpful to companies such as Synthetic Genomics Inc, headed by J Craig Venter, trying to make new organisms that perform specific tasks, such as converting buried coal into methane gas that’s easier to extract from the ground.

Venter’s plan is to create man-made microbes that can help break down the coal in the earth, much as bacteria speed decomposing plant material.

In a conference for alumni at Harvard, Church described how his team assembled a reconstituted ribosome, the first artificial version of the structure capable of remaking itself.

Naturally occurring ribosomes are used now when biotechnology companies genetically engineer cells to make the proteins for vaccines and drugs, such as Genentech Inc.’s Herceptin. Normal ribosomes make some drugs slowly, and others can’t be made at all, said Anthony Forster, a Vanderbilt University pharmacologist who has collaborated with Church on synthetic biology projects.

A man-made, or reconstituted, ribosome may be programmable to make all kinds of molecules, Forster said. ©2009 Bloomebrg News Service