The First Successful Creation of Synthetic Life

With 15 years of work, Craig Venter and his team has successfully created the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell. The bacterial cell, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 contains 1.08 million base pair and it is full functioning. This is truly a historical human achievement and a giant breakthrough in molecular biology.

Figure 1: Dividing M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 under electron microscope. (Source)

Figure 2: Creating bacteria from prokaryotic genomes engineering in yeast. (Source)

Figure 3: The assembly of a synthetic M. mycoides genome in yeast. (Source)



Further Information

1. http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/
2. Full text pdf of the research article "Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome": 
   http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/science.1190719v1.pdf