Word: dna
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...however, Venter had brainstormed a way to automate the process, pulling in supercomputers to do the work of recording each letter in all the necessary snippets of DNA and then knitting the fragments together in a simple and predictable way. If a page of text from a book were torn into pieces, it could be easily reconstructed as long as the tears were made at predetermined places - always before the word only, for example, whenever it appeared on the same page as the word and. Venter's system worked in a similar way, and in 1998 he brashly predicted that...
...Certainly, defining what we mean when we say life has become a moving target over the years. Are we alive? Yes. Is a virus alive? Maybe. Still, a half-century after the discovery of the double helix, nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are - in the same way that lines of code determine software or the digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear. Etch new signals, and you write a new song. That, in genetic terms, is what Venter has done. Working with only the four basic nucleotides that make...
...which the team sequenced in 1995, has one of the smallest known chromosomes of any self-replicating life-form - just 485 genes. What, Venter wondered back then, was the minimum genome an organism needed to survive and reproduce? If you could figure that out, you could determine the basic DNA chassis of all living things and then use it to design your own souped-up or dressed-down versions of life...
...elegant does not mean easy. DNA's nucleotides are strung together like beads on a string, but because it adopts a crystalline structure, that string behaves more like glass. "Even doing normal things like pipetting the pieces would shatter it," says Venter. And although tiny in the microbe world, the mycoplasma's genome still required more than 580,000 nucleotides to assemble...
...Venter decided to start small, with one or two genes, and work his way up by splicing together longer and longer pieces of DNA. That very act of sticking them together proved to be a challenge, since the strands often fall apart. The answer was to design a section of Velcro-like DNA at the ends of each fragment. Since adenine sticks only to thymine and cytosine only to guanine, all the team had to do was end each strand with a nucleotide that would adhere to the one that began the next...