{"id":233851,"date":"2016-03-25T02:13:30","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T02:13:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/mysterious-tiny-germs-us-scientists-build-bacteria-with-smallest-genome-on-earth\/"},"modified":"2016-03-25T02:13:30","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T02:13:30","slug":"mysterious-tiny-germs-us-scientists-build-bacteria-with-smallest-genome-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/mysterious-tiny-germs-us-scientists-build-bacteria-with-smallest-genome-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious tiny germs: US scientists \u2018build\u2019 bacteria with smallest genome on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

American scientists have created a bacterium with the smallest number of genes ever, but they have no idea what almost one-third of them do. What the \u201cdesigners\u201d do know is that without them, the tiny stripped-down life form would die.<\/p>\n

\n

At the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in California, where it was designed and tested, the first minimal synthetic bacterial cell is simply called JCVI-syn3.0.<\/p>\n

It has only 531,560 base pairs and 473 genes. For comparison, lead scientist J. Craig Venter\u2019s first synthetic cell, JCVI-syn1.0, which he and his team built in 2010, had 1.08 million base pairs and 901 genes.<\/p>\n

It took researchers three cycles of designing, building, and testing to pare down the tiny critter, each time making sure that quasi-essential genes necessary for robust growth remained. Eventually, they got a viable, self-replicating minimal synthetic cell that contained just 473 genes.<\/p>\n