Scientists reveal artificial DNA

The experiment, published online by the journal Science, is not a living germ, but its genetic structure.

But scientists from Maryland's J Craig Venter Institute called it the largest man-made stretch of DNA so far, and therefore a logical step in the fledgling field of "synthetic biology" that aims to build new organisms that work differently than nature intended, such as producing new fuels.

The Venter group started with some off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments. They overlapped and joined these stretches to make ever-larger chunks of genetic material until they finally had a man-made copy of the entire genome of a small bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, a genital germ.

Last year, Mr Venter's team performed a "genome transplant" in which researchers transplanted all of the genes from one species of Mycoplasma into another, switching a goat germ into a cattle germ.

Somehow the transplant itself sparked the donor genes to start working; Mr Venter uses a computer analogy to say it "booted up".

Now he must test if this new artificial Mycoplasma genome can boot up, too - by putting the DNA into a living cell to see if takes over and becomes a synthetic organism.

"I don't view that we're creating life," Mr Venter said last year in describing this series of experiments. "I view that we're modifying life to come up with new life forms by designing and synthetically constructing chromosomes."

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