The quest to create life in the lab took a leap forward in February when scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced in Science that they had synthesized an entire bacterial genome from scratch. The JCVI team, led by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Hamilton Smith, began by synthesizing 101 fragments of the genome, each around 6,000 base pairs long. The team then used Escherichia coli bacteria to make many copies of each synthesized DNA snippet. Next the researchers patched the segments into longer pieces, using overlapping sequences to match up the fragments and checking after every step for mistakes.
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