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Synthesizing life on the planet (Ep 94)
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Synthesizing life on the planet (Ep 94)

What’s the smallest number of genes that cells need to grow and reproduce? Is it possible to synthesize minimal genomes and insert them into cells?

What do minimal genomes teach us about life?

In this episode, we talk to John Glass, leader of the Synthetic Biology Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Over the past decade, Glass and colleagues developed techniques for manipulating and synthesizing entire bacterial genomes. Starting with Mycoplasma bacteria, which have very small genomes, they dete…

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