As claimed in pop science media. David Nguyen asks, at Think Tank Learning:
Worth noting, from Elie Dolgin at Nature:
Scientists downsize bold plan to make human genome from scratch: With funding still scarce, GP-write project shifts focus to making virus-resistant human cells.
“Church’s team used synthesis in follow-up work to recode seven codons in the E. coli genome. That effort needed close to 150,000 genetic changes, and it revealed unexpected design constraints and difficulties in stitching together DNA fragments. These have stymied efforts to make the reconstructed bacterium viable.”
“That should be a sobering reminder as the ultra-safe human-cell-line project gets off the ground, says Nili Ostrov, a postdoc in Church’s lab who is leading the research. “In humans,” she says, ”there are going to be a lot of design rules that we just don’t know.” More.
See also: Science News Fact Check: Does Marijuana Cure Cancer? With David Nguyen
Hat tip: For Nature update, Heather Zeiger