But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets,
Daniel 2:28
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52.full.pdfhttp://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v14i10f.htm
"We did not create life from scratch: we transformed existing life into new life. Nor did we design and build a new chromosome from scratch. Rather, using only digitised information, we synthesised a modified version, a copy of the M. mycoides genome with 14 of its genes deleted and a "watermark" written in another 5000-plus base pairs. The result is not an "artificial" life form; it is a living, self-replicating cell that most microbiologists would find hard to distinguish from the progenitor cell, unless they sequenced its DNA.
It took 15 years to get to this proof-of-concept experiment. And it is just that: proof that it is possible to use a computer and four chemical bases to create a cell with no biological ancestor. Of course, we began by modifying an existing genome. Where else to start? Had we tried a new genome design it wouldn't have worked. Even so, we had 99 failures for every success.
Craig Venter |
In plain English, here’s what they did: They
needed to create a DNA molecule that was over 1 million base pairs long. (A DNA
molecule is a twisted pair of long strings of four different kinds of molecules
called bases. It looks like a twisted ladder. Each rung of the ladder is made
from a pair of bases.)
They made this long DNA molecule by putting together
smaller segments of commercially available DNA which they purchased
from Blue Heron. They purchased pieces that were about 1,000 base pairs long and
joined ten of them together to form pieces that were about 10,000 base pairs
long. They took ten of these 10,000 base pair pieces and joined them together to
form pieces about 100,000 base pairs long. Finally, they joined eleven of these
100,000 base pair pieces together to form the complete molecule.
What kind of a machine did they use to do this
assembly, you might ask? They used living
yeast, but it wasn’t easy." Discloure