Prof. John Glass (J. Craig Venter Institute)

Abstract

The minimal cell is the hydrogen atom of cellular biology. Such a cell, because of its simplicity and absence of redundancy would be a platform for investigating just what biological components are required for life, and how those parts work together to make a living cell.  Since the late 1990s, our team at the Venter Institute has been developing a suite of synthetic biology tools that enabled us to build what previously has only been imagined, a minimal cell. Specifically, a bacterial cell with a genome that expresses only the minimum set of genes needed for the cell to divide every two hours that can be grown in pure culture.  That minimal cell has about half of the genes that are in the bacterium on which it was based, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI syn1.0, the so-called synthetic bacteria we reported on in 2010. We used transposon bombardment to identify non-essential…