Minimal bacteria
Once upon a time, we thought there was such a thing as simple life. Now . . . well, we still talk about simple life, but our perception of it has changed drastically.
In the January issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there is an interesting article on “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium”. Mycoplasma genitalium was chosen for study because, according to the abstract, it has the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture, minimal metabolism and little genomic redundancy, and so can be expected to be a good approximation to the minimal set of genes necessary for sustaining bacterial life. Researchers at the Venter Institute identified 382 of its 482 protein-coding genes as essential.
Why it matters? From their introduction:
One consequence of progress in the new field of synthetic biology is an emerging view of cells as assemblages of parts that can be put together to produce an organism with a desired phenotype. That perspective begs the question: “How few parts would it take to construct a cell?” In an environment that is free from stress and provides all necessary nutrients, what would constitute the simplest free-living organism?
The entire article is here; it’s somewhat technical reading, but includes nice graphics.
Implying Creationist Abiogenesis
As usual, I can’t help myself from correcting pseudoscientific arguments, this time from Intelligent Design and based upon the ol’ incredulity. Members of Cornell’s IDEA club on their recently-started blog, The Design Paradigm, are this time pointi…
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