{"id":121097,"date":"2021-03-31T09:25:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T16:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/synthetic-organism-undergoes-cell-division-in-breakthrough-study"},"modified":"2021-03-31T09:25:29","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T16:25:29","slug":"synthetic-organism-undergoes-cell-division-in-breakthrough-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/synthetic-organism-undergoes-cell-division-in-breakthrough-study","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic organism undergoes cell division in breakthrough study"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/synthetic-organism-undergoes-cell-division-in-breakthrough-study2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time, a team of scientists has created a synthetic single-celled organism that can divide and grow like a regular living cell. This breakthrough could lead to designer cells that can produce useful chemicals on demand or treat disease from inside the body.<\/p>\n<p>This new study, by scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and MIT, builds on over a decade\u2019s work in creating synthetic lifeforms. In 2010 a JCVI team created the world\u2019s first cell with a <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/newatlas.com\/first-synthetic-organism-created\/15165\/\">synthetic genome<\/a>, which they dubbed JCVI-syn1.0.<\/p>\n<p>In 2016, the researchers followed that up with JCVI-syn3.0, a version where the goal was to make the organism as simple as possible. With only 473 genes, it was the simplest living cell ever known \u2013 by comparison, an <i>E. coli<\/i> bacterium has well over 4000 genes. But perhaps it was too simple, because the cells weren\u2019t all that effective at dividing. Rather than uniform shapes and sizes, some of them would form filaments and others wouldn\u2019t fully separate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time, a team of scientists has created a synthetic single-celled organism that can divide and grow like a regular living cell. This breakthrough could lead to designer cells that can produce useful chemicals on demand or treat disease from inside the body. This new study, by scientists from the J. Craig Venter [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":550,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/550"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}