External Link - Source: Financial Times
Now his teams – working in tandem at the non-profit J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics, a biotech company in California – are well on the way to making synthetic microbes distinctly different to anything in nature. “We have a design contest to come up with a genome designed completely in a computer,” Venter says. “Three different versions of the genome are being constructed now and we hope to know by the end of the summer whether any of these designs will work as a living cell.”