Genome Mapping - Craig Venter

This may sound outlandish just as much as nanomachines making cellular upgrades and changes; however we have already begun mapping and engineering of genome technologies today. Craig Venter, a 58-year-old entrepreneur of genome mapping, lead the way to understanding the way we, humans can manufacture life. As is a character trait for him, he unraveled a lot of his colleagues and assistants in bypassing the scientific method and horrifying some of them with his results. When he began to clash with his peers at the government's Human Genome Project, he simply quit the project, founding a company called Celera and was racing the government to the finish line.

They said it would take twenty years; he finished in nine months. Venter is one of the many leading the way in biotechnology and genome experimentation. With his lab process called, Genome Shotgun Sequencing Technique, he is able to make a genome defining its many parts and properties; with this understanding, Venter wants to remake life, to create new microorganisms that will cure diseases, produce free energy, and make your life better.

As quoted in an article in the December 2004 issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, he stated:

"The ultimate goal is to make organisms with specific functions," he said.

"I'll give you an example. We'd like to synthesize an organism that can produce Taxol for breast cancer treatment. Right now, Taxol comes from the yew tree. We'd like to find the gene pathways that lead to synthesis of Taxol and then reproduce them in an artificial cell. Or we could produce cells that make chemicals for carpets and clothing, or cells that produce energy, like methane. We could take the photoreceptor from a bacterium in the Sargasso Sea and make hydrogen for fuel cells. The possibilities are almost limitless."

In all aspects of this technology the possibilities are limitless, but evolutionarily necessary. To understand Venter's new project, it is helpful to visualize DNA. Most scientists will tell the layperson to visualize a plate of spaghetti to get a good picture. Describing DNA as a tiny plate of spaghetti that lives inside every cell. When you unravel that spaghetti, you will find that the noodles are made from a series of chemicals all lined up in a row. The precise order of those chemicals is genetic code. The whole code, taken as a unit, is a genome. In our understanding some animals have larger genomes than others.

For example, the human genome is pretty large, about 3 billion chemicals long. The mouse genome is smaller, with only 2.7 billion chemicals, or letters of DNA. The fruit fly has only 180 million letters, which is why they are used in most genome and hereditary experiments. The lesser amount of DNA information limits the amounts of mutations, variation, and overall outcomes of any given trial. Most microorganisms have only a couple hundred thousand. It is on the microscopic scale that most of the genomic observations and testing will occur first, later moving into the larger insect and rodent species.

Even so, Craig Venter is considered a pioneer in the field because of his work and ability in creating a virus called Phi X 174. It is pronounced exactly how it looks and it contains only 5,386 letters of genetic code. That's why Venter made it first. In a word, it was easier. Though it is easy for him to say so, this technology is far from it. But what this gives evidence of is the ability for mankind to engineer and redevelop the genome of not only viruses, but in the viable future, the genome of higher species; humans included.

Venter simply looked up the genetic map for Phi X 174. Because the virus's genome has been mapped since 1978, and has been used in a litany of experiments over the years, and is completely harmless, it seemed like a good test model. Venter knew that it would be easier to reproduce tiny segments of DNA than to attempt the whole thing in one shot. In fact, producing small segments of genetic code has become fairly routine in the last decade. Currently there are several laboratories that will produce segments of DNA and other microscopic pieces parts. However, the cost of these microscopic samples, far outweighs their usefulness in simple test and trials for “un-invested” scientists and sciences.

Scientists have been making fifty and sixty-letter genetic segments, called oligonucleotides, with increasing accuracy, fusing together individual chemicals of DNA. The way Venter saw it these were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He could divide Phi X 174 into about one hundred parts, with each one containing fifty to sixty letters of DNA, and then he could manufacture each piece individually. After that, the only trick would be putting the puzzle together. So he drew up the list of each piece and sent his order to an oligonucleotide manufacturer. When the delivery came in, Venter threw the puzzle pieces in a petri dish, twisted the thermostat to fifty-five degrees Celsius, stirred the pot a few times, used some developmental processes and came out with ‘Artificial life’. Even with this test evidence Venter, as much of the scientific community, is less interested in the esoteric particulars than the big picture.

Venter's team was not the first to manufacture a synthetic genome, nor the first to make a working virus. In 2002 a team in Stony Brook, New York, manufactured a complete synthetic replica of the Polio virus, using a genetic map they got from the Internet. It was hailed as a breakthrough, just like Venter's. But Venter's project was unprecedented in a different way. The polio project had taken more than a year to complete, and at the end, the virus barely functioned, with only one ten-thousandth of the activity that polio is supposed to have. By contrast, Venter's project took just fourteen days, and he got 100 percent activity. Phi X 174 was replicating; and on a scientific scale, it was alive. Once again, Venter had taken a long and convoluted process and found a better, faster, and cheaper way to do it. Not that he's celebrating, Yet.

"The goal was not to make a virus," he says. "We made the virus to test the technique."
Years ago it would have been unthinkable to believe that creating life outside the womb was impossible. However, it appears that this is not the stuff of comic fiction or science fiction, but fact. Not only are we developing ways to create new microorganisms, viruses, and life forms; we are developing new ways to use the discoveries that are not even a reality yet. Already at MIT and Caltech there are courses where young biologist and microorganism engineers can study, test, and develop techniques involving genome manufacture, cell biology, DNA alteration, and cloning.