IBEA Receives $3 Million Dept. of Energy Grant for Synthetic Genome Development
Hamilton Smith, M.D., Nobel Laureate, Named Scientific Director of IBEA

ROCKVILLE, MD — The Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA) has been awarded a three-year, $3 million grant from the Office of Science, Department of Energy. The grant will be used for research to develop a synthetic chromosome which is a first step in the Institute's work toward developing cost-effective and efficient biological energy sources. Nobel Laureate Hamilton O. Smith, M.D., has joined IBEA as scientific director.

"With fossil fuel consumption continuing to rise and with it serious environmental damage to our planet, it is imperative that we explore alternative ideas to abate this situation," said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., president of IBEA.

"IBEA was founded with the goal of exploring biological mechanisms for dealing with carbon sequestration and to study the creation of other potential energy sources such as hydrogen. We believe that building a synthetic chromosome is an important step toward realizing these goals because we could potentially engineer an organism with the ideal qualities to begin to cope with our energy issues."

The ability to create a living cell from scratch, by chemically synthesizing all its components, is far beyond present technology. But several years ago Dr. Clyde Hutchinson of the University of North Carolina tried an alternative route to the same goal by taking one known bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, and trying to define the minimum number of genes it needed to survive by stripping out all the unnecessary ones.

Excluding viruses, Mycoplasma genitalium is the simplest living organism known, that can reproduce itself unaided. Viruses always need to hijack a cell of another organism to reproduce. M. genitalium has only 486 different proteins, which is only about a tenth of what the bacterium E. coli, and of the order of 1/100 to 1/1000 of the number of proteins that more complex organisms possess. About half of the 486 proteins of M. genitalium have a known function; little is known about what the remainder do. The genetic information resides in a circular chromosomal DNA molecule of 580,000 bases. In comparison the simplest viruses known, like poliovirus, have 7440 bases and the E. coli has about 4.64 million bp in their respective genome.

Hutchinson reported in 1999 that the mycobacterium M. Genitalium should get by with as few as 265 genes (see Table 1). This could be thought of as the minimal set of genes needed to sustain life. A piece of DNA containing these genes might in principle be synthesized and inserted into a cell that had also been assembled artificially, probably with bits and pieces from other cells.

Already 1999, at a now famous speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement (AAAS) taking place in Anaheim in southern California, Craig Venter argued that the creation of man-made micro-organisms from a cocktail of small molecules could reveal how life first evolved on Earth. At this occasion he also acknowledged such an experiment would raised a multitude of ethical and security issues.

Now Dr. Venter has resumed Dr. Hutchison's project. If he succeeds in creating a minimalist organism, he may then try to add useful functions to it, he told The Washington Post yesterday. They were the first to report that the project would get support from US Department of Energy (DOE) by a grant of US$3 million.

Ari Patrinos, a senior Energy Department administrator who will help oversee the project, said the organism was an attractive starting point to create a "minimal genome" because it is so minimal already.

"We know even the simplest of cells is incredibly complicated," Patrinos said — "too complicated, at least so far, to understand completely."

"This is a case where we're trying to cheat a little bit, to take the smallest and simplest and make it smaller and simpler."


Comments:
J. Craig Venter is a South African-born gene scientist that solved one version (his own!) of the human genome two years ago.
J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith co-founded Celera Genomics.


Profiles: Venter (Time) - Smith (at the Nobel e-Museum)