| Sumario: | Part of a special section on the January 1999 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Craig Venter discussed efforts to discover the minimum set of genes a creature requires to survive and reproduce. This could throw some light on how life originated, or at least on which of its biochemical processes evolved first. Furthermore, it will simplify, and may even require, the creation of the world's first artificial living organism. Work on the minimal-genome project is being undertaken at the Institute for Genomic Research, which Venter used to direct and is now led by his wife and fellow scientist, Claire Fraser. The focus of the project is a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, which lives in human reproductive and respiratory tracts. Experiments suggest that in the laboratory, M. genitialium can survive without the services of 140 genes, which is 30 percent of its genetic complement. Whether it can survive with all of the genes knocked out at once will require a different experiment—one that points toward an artificial organism.
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