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Enlarge Image Guerrilla tactics. Biologists have created synthetically engineered E. coli (left) that explode and kill pathogenic P. aeruginosa (right). Credit: CDC Like any good military unit, infectious bacteria have access to numerous weapons and efficient communication systems. But like soldiers in the field, they're also susceptible to suicide bombers. Researchers have used the tools of synthetic biology to create an Escherichia coli cell that can infiltrate foreign bacteria and explode, killing off the pathogens along with itself. The project, says bioengineer Chueh Loo Poh of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, was "inspired by nature," particularly by quorum sensing,...

The idea of using genetic engineering to enhance human beings scares a lot of people. For example, at a 2006 meeting called by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Richard Hayes, the executive director of the left-leaning Center for Bioethics and Society, testified that “enhancement technologies would quickly be adopted by the most privileged, with the clear intent of widening the divisions that separate them and their progeny from the rest of the human species.” Deploying such enhancement technologies would “deepen genetic and biological inequality among individuals,” exacerbating “tendencies towards xenophobia, racism and warfare.” Hayes concluded that allowing...

Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday. "We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells." Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie...

US researchers have genetically modified bacteria to eat carbon dioxide and produce isobutyraldehyde - a precursor to several useful chemicals, including isobutanol, which has great potential as a fuel alternative to petrol. The modified bacteria are highly efficient and powered by sunlight, so a future goal is to set up colonies near to industrial plants. This would allow greenhouse gases to be recycled into useful chemical feedstock - supplying several hydrocarbons that are typically obtained from petroleum.  Liao and his team used genetically modified cyanobacteria to produce isobutyraldehyde from carbon dioxide Cyanobacteria and microalgae that consume CO2 have been identified for...

SANTA ANA, Calif., Nov. 3 /Christian Newswire/ -- While many people continue to believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, a group of scientists will present overwhelming scientific evidence against Darwin's speculations. "If Charles Darwin knew 150 years ago what we know today, he likely would not have published Origin of the Species," said John Baumgardner, Ph.D., whose organization, Logos Research Associates, will lead the two-day "Darwin Was Wrong" conference Nov. 13-14 at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. "We can perhaps excuse Darwin, given his ignorance about the true complexity of living organisms and about genetics," said Dr. Baumgardner, a geophysicist...

Plant geneticist Dr John Sanford began working as a research scientist at Cornell University in 1980. He co-invented the ‘gene gun’ approach to genetic engineering of plants. This technology has had a major impact on agriculture around the world...

The history of warfare and the history of disease are unquestionably interwoven. Throughout the history of warfare, disease and non-battle injury have accounted for more deaths and loss of combat capability than from actual battle in war itself. The most striking example is the great influenza pandemic during World War I that killed 20 million people or more worldwide in 1918.1 Although this was a naturally occurring event, what if a country could create a biological agent that could yield the same catastrophic loss of life on the enemy? That, in essence, is the potential effect of applying genetic engineering2...

Yeast cell surrogate may help scientists to engineer synthetic life.A modified genome from one bacteria has been inserted into another.J. Craig Venter Institute. Scientists have devised a way to modify an organism that was previously impossible to genetically engineer in the lab.The method, developed by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, could aid the development of biomaterials and biofuels by helping scientists to genetically engineer species that have so far been beyond their reach. It could also aid the Venter institute's project to create synthetic life. In their paper, published today in...

An engineered bacterium can deliver a therapeutic protein straight to the gut when fed with xylan.Could genetically-engineered bacteria help to banish gastrointestinal woes?Punchstock A gut-dwelling bacterium has been genetically engineered to deliver a dose of therapeutic protein on demand.Protein production in the engineered bacterium is switched on only when its host eats the complex sugar xylan. Tests on mice that had colonies of the bacteria in their guts showed that the expressed protein can successfully treat an inflammatory bowel disease called colitis.The research, to be published in the journal Gut1, has potential as an alternative method for delivering drugs to...

Enlarge ImageTailored evolution. Targeting genetic changes to specific regions of a genome allows researchers to rapidly evolve microbes.Credit: H. Wang et al./Nature Improved DNA sequencing technology is making reading genomes faster and cheaper every day. But modifying genes in microbes and other organisms still requires slow and painstaking effort. Now, researchers report that they've come up with a new way to modify the genomes of billions of microbes simultaneously and then finger the ones with the most interesting changes. Because the technique will likely work with most types of genomes, it could turbocharge efforts to engineer microbes to produce...

BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) — High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology. Labs get bogged down with particular DNA sentences, tinkering at times with subsections of a single gene ad nauseam before moving along to the next one. A team has finally overcome this obstacle by developing a new cell programming method called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE). Published online in Nature on July 26, the platform...

Graceful waltzers can count to three, and now stretches of man-made DNA can do it too. Researchers have built a series of genes and put them into bacterial cells, enabling the cells to tally events. The new counters may endow engineered cells with previously impossible functions, the team reports in the May 29 Science. The engineered counters may be used to monitor toxins in the environment or keep track of the number of times a cell divides. The system can even be programmed to destroy the cell that holds it after a certain number of events. “This is the first...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ― The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories. In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

<p>SAN FRANCISCO – The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.</p> <p>Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.</p>

Regarding the Instruction Dignitas PersonaeAim In recent years, biomedical research has made great strides, opening new possibilities for the treatment of disease, but also giving rise to serious questions which had not been directly treated in the Instruction Donum vitae (22 February 1987).  A new Instruction, which is dated 8 September 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seeks to provide some responses to these new bioethical questions, as these have been the focus of expectations and concerns in large sectors of society.  In this way, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks both...

A Spokane woman was sentenced Tuesday to three years in federal prison in the May 2001 firebombing of the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture. Lacey Phillabaum, 33, of Spokane, is one of five people -- members of a domestic terrorist group called the Earth Liberation Front -- who were accused by federal prosecutors of the arson attack that destroyed the building along with precious samples of rare and endangered plants species being cultivated for reintroduction into the Cascades. The ELF cell, dubbed "The Family," acted on the erroneous belief that a scientist at the center was doing the...

HUMAN-cow embryos have been created in a world first at Newcastle University in England, hailed by the scientific community, but labelled "monstrous" by opponents. A team has grown hybrid embryos after injecting human DNA into eggs taken from cows' ovaries, which had most of their genetic material removed...

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with...

AUSTRALIAN scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say. Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas. -snip- Even farmers who laugh at the idea of environmentally friendly kangaroo farts say that's nothing to joke about, particularly given the devastating drought Australia is suffering. -snip-

For an organ that has been scanned millions of times by experts using high-end imaging technology, the brain remains in large part a shrouded landscape, as lost in darkness as the ocean floor. One reason has less to with the brain’s complexity than its uniformity: it contains billions of identical-looking cells, most sprouting multiple identical-looking branches to other cells, near and far. A needle in a haystack at least looks different from the strands around it; finding and mapping large numbers of neurons is more like working out the root system beneath a tropical rain forest. But last week, researchers...

US researchers have engineered a line of "mighty mice" whose human equivalent would have similar abilities to the bicycling champion Lance Armstrong, according to research published Thursday. The breed of mice can run six kilometers (four miles) at a speed of 20 meters (yards) per minute for up to six hours without stopping, according to Richard Hanson, a biochemistry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," said Hanson, the senior author of the article...

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new...

LONDON: Controversial US scientist Craig Venter claimed to have constructed a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made from the laboratory, a step towards the creation of first new artificial life form on Earth. "This landmark will be a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before," sources reported on Saturday, quoting Venter as saying. He is expected to announce the discovery -- a feat of bio-engineering never previously achieved -- within weeks. According...

Jellyfish with up to a dozen heads have been created in the laboratory by carefully monkeying with a few genes. The genetic experiments could shed light on how natural colonies of other multi-headed organisms first originated, including some that build coral reefs. Researchers targeted so-called Cnox genes, which help control how the bodies of jellyfish are laid out as their embryos develop. These genes are closely related to Hox genes, which play a similar role in humans. How they did it They experimented on the European hydromedusa (Eleutheria dichotoma), collected from the south of France. (In Greek mythology, the Hydra...

FORGET genetic engineering. The new idea is synthetic biology, an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic circuitry of living organisms. The ambitious undertaking includes genetic engineering, the now routine insertion of one or two genes into a bacterium or crop plant. But synthetic biologists aim to rearrange genes on a much wider scale, that of a genome, or an organism’s entire genetic code. Their plans include microbes modified to generate cheap petroleum out of plant waste, and, further down the line, designing whole organisms from scratch. Synthetic biologists can identify a network of useful genes on their computer screens...

Scientists at the institute directed by J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in sequencing the human genome, are reporting that they have successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another, an achievement they see as a major step toward creating synthetic forms of life. Other scientists who did not participate in the research praised the achievement, published yesterday on the Web site of the journal Science. But some expressed skepticism that it was as significant as Dr. Venter said. His goal is to make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used...

April 26, 2007     First designer babies to beat breast cancer   Mark Henderson, Science Editor   Two couples whose families have been ravaged by breast cancer are to become the first to screen embryos to prevent them having children at risk of the disease, The Times has learnt. Tests will allow the couples to take the unprecedented step of selecting embryos free from a gene that carries a heightened risk of the cancer but does not always cause it. The move will reignite controversy over the ethics of embryo screening. An application to test for the BRCA1...

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, April 2, 2007 (POP.org/LifeSiteNews.com) - For a number of years now, a great deal of discussion has taken place among scientists and in the popular media about the genetic engineering of children. Will it soon be possible, for prices widely affordable at least to the upper-middle class, to guarantee that children have a high IQ, or excellent athletic ability, or be over 6 feet tall, or have blond hair and blue eyes? Is it right to commodify children in this way, and have parents choosing options as they do with cars? And wouldn’t it be boring to...

LONDON, February 27, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British government’s plans to ban the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos are over after a group of 45 scientists, ethicists and politicians published an open letter in January saying that a ban would hold back the advancement of British science.   The Times reports that the government is now dropping plans to ban the experiments and will instead offer funding for a public debate before new legislation is drafted.   The open letter, published in the Times in response to the government’s December 2006 announcement that it planned to draft legislation to ban...

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand. He divides environmentalists into romantics...

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- The power to create "perfect" designer babies looms over the world of prenatal testing. But what if doctors started doing the opposite? Creating made-to-order babies with genetic defects would seem to be an ethical minefield, but to some parents with disabilities -- say, deafness or dwarfism -- it just means making babies like them. And a recent survey of U.S. clinics that offer embryo screening suggests it's already happening. Three percent, or four clinics surveyed, said they have provided the costly, complicated procedure to help families create children with a disability. Some doctors have denounced the...

The refrigerator is used to lengthen the life of your food, and a new study suggests a similar principle could prolong your life, too. Researchers have found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5?C extends their lifespan by around 15%. In the future, people might be able to take a drug to achieve a similar effect on body temperature and enjoy a longer life, they say. ... Bruno Conti at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, US, and colleagues designed genetically engineered mice with a specific brain-cell defect in a region called the lateral hypothalamus. The...

Boy or girl? Almost half of U.S. fertility clinics that offer embryo screening say they allow couples to choose the sex of their child, the most extensive survey of the practice suggests. Sex selection without any medical reason to warrant it was performed in about 9 percent of all embryo screenings last year, the survey found. Another controversial procedure - helping parents conceive a child who could supply compatible cord blood to treat an older sibling with a grave illness - was offered by 23 percent of clinics, although only 1 percent of screenings were for that purpose in 2005....

Is the cloning of human babies' tissue an insult to god? Posted at: 22:01 A proposal to create babies that are both cloned and genetically altered to prevent serious hereditary disease has been outlined by the leader of the team that created Dolly the sheep, re-igniting the debate on the moral implications of cloning human beings. Ever since news that Dolly had been cloned from an adult cell made headlines around the world, Prof Ian Wilmut has repeatedly said he is "implacably opposed" to cloning a human being. But in his forthcoming book After Dolly, serialised in The Daily Telegraph,...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lots of people think bacon is good -- but good for you? Scientists said the key to accomplishing that may be a microscopic worm. Geneticists have mixed DNA from a type of roundworm and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-three fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease. Earlier experiments have succeeded in manipulating animals' fat content, but most never made it out of the lab because of taste problems. While boosting omega-threes doesn't decrease the fat content in pigs, the fatty acids are also important to brain development and may...

CHICAGO - Buying organic milk these days - or organic apples, eggs, or beef - no longer has to mean an extra trip to a Whole Foods supermarket or the local co-op. Organic products now line the shelves at Safeway and Costco. And Wal-Mart - already the nation's largest organic-milk seller - says it wants to sell more organic food. Large companies including Kraft, General Mills, and Kellogg own sizable organic- and natural-food brands. Now, they are developing organic versions of their own products, too. Still, while some organic-food fans welcome its broadening appeal and availability, others worry that the...

SAN FRANCISCO - A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food. "We just want...

A conference in Waikiki sparked a protest today over an industry that's beginning to thrive in Hawaii - biotechnology. Police monitored a small group of Native Hawaiians and environmentalists who gathered to protest practices in genetic engineering. Across the street, more than 300 people gathered from around the Pacific Rim to share ideas and compare progress in the larger field of biotech. "The biotech industry isn't paying any attention to the serious risk to human health and the environment of their experiments," said Isaac Moriwake of Earthjustice. "The result is they're turning the people of Hawaii and the lands of...

A recently discovered genetic mechanism appears to play an important role in the development of cancer, scientists are reporting today, in findings that may eventually lead to new ways to diagnose and treat the disease. The discoveries "change the landscape in cancer genetics," Dr. Paul S. Meltzer of the National Human Genome Research Institute wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature, which is publishing three papers on the findings today. Other scientists cautioned that the new findings merely added detail to the already complex picture of how tumors arise and grow. The findings concern micro-RNA's, which are tiny snippets...

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 3 - In a significant victory for large biotechnology companies like Monsanto, Brazil's lower house of Congress has overwhelmingly approved legislation paving the way for the legalization of genetically modified crops. After months of delays and heated debate, legislators passed a biotechnology law late Wednesday night by a vote of 352 to 60. The bill had pitted farmers and scientists against environmental and religious groups. Besides lifting a longstanding ban on the sale and planting of gene-altered seeds, the legislation also clears the way for research involving human embryonic stem cells that have been frozen for...

Genetically engineered embryonic stem cells could be a viable option to electronic cardiac pacemakers. Since human embryonic stem cells have the capability to transform into any type of cell found in the human body, they have the potential to replace damaged cells of any type. So scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland engineered, grew and developed them into heart cells. They then infused them with a gene that glows green to make them easily identifiable in the presence of other animal cells. Of the engineered cells grown, those that beat on their own (an indication they...

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. advertisement In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Last summer, on the site of 35 former hat factories where toxic mercury was once used to cure pelts, city officials in Danbury, Conn., deployed a futuristic weapon: 160 Eastern cottonwoods. Dr. Richard Meagher, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, genetically engineered the trees to extract mercury from the soil, store it without being harmed, convert it to a less toxic form of mercury and release it into the air. It was one of two dozen proposals Dr. Meagher has submitted to various agencies over two decades for engineering trees to soak up chemicals from contaminated soil....

Genetically engineered crops do not pose health risks that cannot also arise from crops created by other techniques, including conventional breeding, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report issued yesterday. The conclusion backs the basic approach now underlying government oversight of biotech foods, that special food safety regulations are not needed just because foods are genetically engineered. Nevertheless, the report said that genetic engineering and other techniques used to create novel crops could result in unintended, harmful changes to the composition of food, and that scrutiny of such crops should be tightened before they go to market. "The...

Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines By W. Wayt Gibbs Evolution is a wellspring of creativity; 3.6 billion years of mutation and competition have endowed living things with an impressive range of useful skills. But there is still plenty of room for improvement. Certain microbes can digest the explosive and carcinogenic chemical TNT, for example--but wouldn't it be handy if they glowed as they did so, highlighting the location of buried land mines or contaminated soil? Wormwood shrubs generate a potent medicine against malaria but only in trace...

Tests Show U.S. Failure to Block Contamination From Gene-Altered Varieties Much of the U.S. supply of ordinary crop seeds has become contaminated with strands of engineered DNA, suggesting that current methods for segregating gene-altered seed plants from traditional varieties are failing, according to a pilot study released yesterday. More than two-thirds of 36 conventional corn, soy and canola seed batches contained traces of DNA from genetically engineered crop varieties in lab tests commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based advocacy group. The actual amount of foreign DNA present in U.S. seeds appears to be small, and most engineered...

A new report commissioned by the government suggests that it will be difficult to completely prevent genetically engineered plants and animals from having unintended environmental and public health effects. The report, released yesterday by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, says that while there are many techniques being developed to prevent genetically engineered organisms or their genes from escaping into the wild, most techniques are still in early development and none appear to be completely effective. "One of our big messages throughout the whole report is that there are very few bioconfinement methods that are well...

Move to Ban Altered Crops Is Focused on California Published: January 11, 2004 UKIAH, Calif., Jan. 10 (AP) — The center of the nation's anti-biotechnology movement can be found these days here in Mendocino County, a quirky region with a strong streak of independence. Farmers and businesses in this Northern California county are trying to persuade voters to pass a measure on March 2 that would prohibit genetically modified plants and animals from being raised or kept in the county. "I believe that genetic engineering at this stage is the biggest uncontrolled biological experiment going on in the world today,"...

An attempt to cure infertility by creating babies with three genetic parents was halted when twins died in the womb, it emerged yesterday. The experiment, in which researchers combined elements from two newly-conceived eggs to create a single viable embryo, was designed to help women whose eggs are not good enough to reactivate a pregnancy. But while two of the "reconstructed" embryos developed into foetuses in the womb, one died at 24 weeks and the other at 29 weeks. American researchers who handed the work over to colleagues in China, after the experiment was effectively banned in the United States,...