no one has made synthetic life larger than a few cells
Not even that. Plenty of tweaking things that already exist but to call anything that’s been done today “synthetic” is just marketing hype.
The Craig Venter Institute chemically synthesized the already-known genome of one bacterial species (no small feat, putting all the short fragments you can directly chemically synthesize together in the right order is HARD, they mostly did it inside yeast cells using the yeast’s DNA repair machinery) and blasted billions of copies of it into billions of bacteria of another species, and after a few days a probably single-to-double-digit number of the bacteria that got the synthesized genome blasted into them had lost their original genome and were running the new one and were built like the new genome’s species and made colonies. Their procedure for genome replacement only works on that particular species. They also have their ‘minimal genome project’, where they deleted genes from an existing bacterium one by one until they found the smallest viable set under laboratory conditions.
Numerous groups have synthesized viruses or particles-made-mostly-from-viral-proteins using synthetic DNA blasted into cells, but I hardly think that counts since again its mostly wild sequence and viruses often have single-digit numbers of proteins.
There was a big kadoo recently about E. coli bearing a single synthetic nucleotide pair in their genome (non ATGC) and while very cool and potentially useful in the future for attempts to expand the genetic code, it was also mutagenic and they needed to be kept in very specific conditions and coddled to keep it and not ‘repair’ the ‘defect’.
Modifying existing living things is another matter and has been done to all manner of single cell and multicellular creatures and I literally just did it yesterday. EDIT THE NEXT DAY: Success! The yeast integrated the DNA into the chromosome, now to check and make sure the protein fusion is actually doing what it’s supposed to do...
Not even that. Plenty of tweaking things that already exist but to call anything that’s been done today “synthetic” is just marketing hype.
The Craig Venter Institute chemically synthesized the already-known genome of one bacterial species (no small feat, putting all the short fragments you can directly chemically synthesize together in the right order is HARD, they mostly did it inside yeast cells using the yeast’s DNA repair machinery) and blasted billions of copies of it into billions of bacteria of another species, and after a few days a probably single-to-double-digit number of the bacteria that got the synthesized genome blasted into them had lost their original genome and were running the new one and were built like the new genome’s species and made colonies. Their procedure for genome replacement only works on that particular species. They also have their ‘minimal genome project’, where they deleted genes from an existing bacterium one by one until they found the smallest viable set under laboratory conditions.
Numerous groups have synthesized viruses or particles-made-mostly-from-viral-proteins using synthetic DNA blasted into cells, but I hardly think that counts since again its mostly wild sequence and viruses often have single-digit numbers of proteins.
There was a big kadoo recently about E. coli bearing a single synthetic nucleotide pair in their genome (non ATGC) and while very cool and potentially useful in the future for attempts to expand the genetic code, it was also mutagenic and they needed to be kept in very specific conditions and coddled to keep it and not ‘repair’ the ‘defect’.
Modifying existing living things is another matter and has been done to all manner of single cell and multicellular creatures and I literally just did it yesterday. EDIT THE NEXT DAY: Success! The yeast integrated the DNA into the chromosome, now to check and make sure the protein fusion is actually doing what it’s supposed to do...