Jennifer C. England,1 Barrett S. Perchuk,2 Michael T. Laub,2 and James W. Gober1* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1569,1 Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-43072 Received September 14, 2009; Accepted November 16, 2009.
Last July, scientists created the first "synthetic cell," an organism that's controlled by a chemically synthesized genome edited on a computer and stitched together in the lab. One year later, biologists at the Fifth Annual Synthetic Biology conference at Stanford University are still struggling to take the next step in the field.