And we thought artificial life was in the distant future… J. Craig Venter and his institute has successfully manufactured the first synthetic yeast organism, in one step!
The key? "Co-transformation of 25 different pieces at once" writes lead author Daniel Gibson, a JCVI scientist, in the advance issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
“Thus, large DNA molecules can be assembled much more rapidly from synthetic or naturally occurring sub-fragments than with any other system described previously.”

J. Craig Venter Institute has dedicated its efforts to creating a synthetic organism, and this new finding is one step closer to …read more

 
Geneticist Craig Venter has announced that he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.  He disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California. Among the audience were Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step, Venter says, is to re-engineer existing life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste.  Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste.
Venter’s team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that …read more

Micrograph images of synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium 
J Craig Venter and his team at the J Craig Venter Institute Rockville, Md. Venter continue to expand our horizons of what constitutes life.  They have built, from scratch, a synthetic chromosome containing all the genetic material needed to produce a primitive bacterium – this is considered a giant step toward the creation of artificial life.
The feat is described in an online edition of the journal Science.  A team led by Dr. Hamilton Smith, director of the Venter Institute’s Synthetic Biology Group, has manufactured from laboratory chemicals a ring of DNA containing all the genes of Mycoplasma genitalium – …read more