It's not finished yet. But if and when it is, it will be the greatest feat of genetic engineering by far. A team in the US is part of the way towards recoding the E. coli bacterium to work with a genetic code that's different from all other organisms on Earth. That means making more than 62,000 changes to its genome. "We take on projects other groups say are impossibly expensive - or just plain impossible," says the team leader George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, for whom this is one step towards even more ambitious creations.
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