neogenesis

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The title reminds you of some Japanese sci-fi anime, yes? Well, not too a far shot has been made by two research teams by creating unnatural to Earth life. Basically it uses an amino-acid that no other life form on Earth uses and supposedly has never used.

Read about it here: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/neogenesis_scitues_010501-1.html

"It is a first step to creating organisms that use building blocks other than the ones we are all familiar with," Schimmel told SPACE.com. "In that sense, you could consider it an alternative life form."

Astrobiologists, chemists and other scientists say this ability to tinker with biology will provide new ways to investigate how life began on Earth and how it evolved. It might also help determine whether extraterrestrial life could follow different rules of biology.

Schimmel said the result raises the possibility that unusual amino acids in space could provide the building blocks of unimagined living systems, and that "a more primitive code could be used to get life started."

David W. Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz, said the results "confirm that the life process is not a perfect machine, but instead a molecular system that will use whatever it can find as long as it works."

And while I always welcome scientific progress I have an unscientific uneasyness that something might go wrong and someday we'll create an organism that will have the potential to bring doom to most other life forms on Earth. But that's only because I've watched a few to many Japanese animes on this subject. Sorry

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

I don’t know much about this sort of research, so I cannot speak with any authority. A very quick great scan of the literature reveals that over 30 novel amino acids have been genetically encoded in response to unique triplet and quadruplet codons including fluorescent, photoreactive, and redox-active amino acids, glycosylated amino acids, and amino acids with keto, azido, acetylenic, and heavy-atom-containing side chains. By removing the limitations imposed by the existing 20 amino acid code, it may be possible to generate proteins and perhaps entire organisms with new or enhanced properties. So it’s not surprising that some people have reservations about creating dangerous organisms.

Of course, I cannot rule that out, but I think it’s unlikely. From what I read, this sort of research has only been possible in laboratory strains of bacteria and yeast. Standard laboratory strains have been genetically engineered within an inch if their lives and can generally only survive in the rich and luxurious conditions of laboratory media plates. They are poor at out-competing ‘wildtype’ bacteria if they managed to escape the lab, even with some enhanced protein function due to incorporation of “unnatural” amino acids. So care is definitely needed, but this isn’t doomsday stuff.<P>

 

[CharonZ]

Hercules is absolutely right. Most lab strains are cripples. Furthermore, even if you engineer a bacterium to use alternative amino acids you'll either need to feed them with it or reconstruct the complete synthesis pathway...