American microbiologists have created a primitive somatic cell that can grow and multiply with a minimal amount of genes, edition Cell writes.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, in 2010, captured one of the least organized and self-reproducing organisms - Mycoplasma. DNA was removed from it and replaced with a genetic code of 473 genes, which first got programmatically written and then synthesized. Thus, a "cyber organism" called JCVI-syn1.0 was created.
"We want to understand the fundamental rules of life through these experiments, but it remains a black box," the study authors wrote.
