The Big DNA Contest, launched in 2004, aimed to inspire innovation in synthetic biology by inviting participants to design a 40,000-base-pair DNA sequence. However, no applications were submitted, indicating a lack of imagination within the field at the time. Today, advancements in genomics and DNA synthesis have led to significant developments, including synthetic strains of bacteria and engineered yeast genomes. These projects illustrate the transformative potential of synthetic genomics and highlight the invaluable learning experiences from ambitious genome-writing endeavors as researchers push the boundaries of genetic engineering.
“In the end, zero applications were received,” says Cai, a synthetic biologist at the University of Manchester, UK. “That just tells you that even if you could make synthetic DNA for free, nobody really had enough imagination 20 years ago.”
Today, steady progress in genomics and computational biology - not to mention DNA synthesis and assembly - have yielded multiple examples of what an ambitious, imaginative genome-writing effort can achieve.
These efforts have been invaluable learning experiences, says Akos Nyerges, a synthetic-genomics researcher involved with the E. coli rewriting effort in George Church's lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
The synthetic bacterial strain JCVI-syn3A, developed at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), is a streamlined version of Mycoplasma mycoides that survives and replicates despite having had several hundred non-essential genes stripped away.
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