A team of scientists led by renowned biologist Craig Venter has made a breakthrough some 20 years in the making: they've managed to create a species of bacteria in the lab with a genetic code that's smaller than any found in nature. With just 437 genes, the lab-made organism is carrying the absolute known minimum amount of genetic code required to support life.
By creating this self-replicating bacterium, scientists from the Synthetic Genomics lab and the J. Craig Venter Institute hope to get a better understanding of the function of the individual genes that make up every living organism - while we're making new discoveries all the time, there's still a lot we don't know about these vital biological building blocks.
Of the catchily named JCVI-syn3.0 microbe's 437 genes, only 149 have a known function. In other words, we know the rest are necessary for life to exist, but we haven't figured out what their purpose is yet. To help scientists find out more, what Venter and his team are now learning from this experiment is being added to a public database so anyone can study them.=read more=http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-created-a-living-organism-with-the-smallest-genome-yet
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