Things have changed a little today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video ... -life-form

I came here to post the same news.

Here is a link to the Science's news of it. You can also find a link to the article there (though it requires subscription).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

So he is finally done, very cool.

This really was the next thing the synbio community was waiting for(what's the next big event in the pipe?)

There is something I've been thinking of in regards to this.

Venter built the chromosome artificially from scratch and put it into an existing chassis. But does the chassis have – at least in part - its own chemistry, with its own regulation that doesn't involve the DNA? Information that gets passed on by the cytoplasm during cell division?

The chromosome has the blueprint for all proteins, so maybe everything needed to reverse engineer the regulation can be contained there.. but then again the chassis, not the chromosome, holds the information on the concentration and placement of those proteins. It seems feasible to me that the chassis holds information not contained in the chromosome. Such as settings(at least).

This is maybe something every one but me already know the answer to?

In any case one can do useful enough stuff without fully understanding the finer points of the chassis.

I like the Venterian esthetics of that Guardian clip... the way he takes his time to explain the news on a shitty webcam. The man is extremely wealthy, he is changing the world in a very real sense... and delivers the news on a shitty webcam from what looks like his living room.

The man, the myth, the legend, the punk.

-Splicer

Yes it does but that information will be diluted during cell divisions and replaced by the information encoded by the new genome. The cell does not just turn into another cell but it is a rather gradual process. Actually in the beginning the cells will even have two genomes the donor and the recipient. The recipient genome will be gradually lost during cell divisions while donor genome is maintained under antibiotic selection.

Amazing!

I was thinking maybe it has to work that way. Thanks. But still.. the settings, gradients, upon which the new chassis is built are inherited from the old chassis.

What happens if one puts the same genome in different chassis? Will they then still after a few generations show identical chassis?

I know this is a bit off topic in regards to Venter & co:s feat(cellular boot up), it was just a question that came up in my head.

-Splicer

I'm not sure how well this answer fits your question, but one of the people who worked on that article answered elsewhere that "The "recipient cell" (M. capricolum) is a very closely related species to the "donor cell" synthetic genome from M. mycoides. It's not yet clear just how different the donor genome can be for the transplantation step to still work."