| MadSci Network: General Biology |
Not quite yet, if you mean by living organism something other than viruses. If you mean viruses, poliovirus has been reconstituted from non-living reagents. So far to my knowledge no bacteria or anything more complicated than a virus have been: but it should only be a matter of time.
[Moderator's Note: Craig Venter's autonymous institute is attempting to create the first "synthetic organism", and have successfully created the first synthetic bacterial genome. However, since they needed to use pre-existing organisms (e.g., yeast) to do this it isn't clear if this counts as making things "from scratch" (although I use yeast to make beer from scratch so maybe it does). For more information take a look at the following paper and links:
Gibson DG, Benders GA, Andrews-Pfannkoch C, Denisova EA, Baden-Tillson H, Zaveri J, Stockwell TB,
Brownley A, Thomas DW, Algire MA, Merryman C, Young L, Noskov VN, Glass JI, Venter JC, Hutchison
CA 3rd, Smith HO. (2008)
Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome
Science 319(5867):1215 - 1220.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1151721
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080124175924.htm
http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/press/2008-01-24.htm
-- Steve Mack]
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