Anthropobiota: Tree of Synthetic Life Friday, May 9 2008
biology 1:37 pm
A proposed name for the new kingdom of synthetic life: Anthropobiota.
(This is hardly original… see Anthropocene, but it seems most likely to catch on.)
The first member of Anthropobiota will likely be Mycoplasma laboratorium, at the J. Craig Venter Institute. The group also “hopes to eventually synthesize bacteria to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, and also to absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases”, according to the Wikipedia page. This would lead to additional species for specific purposes. The point of Mycoplasma laboratorium is to implement a “minimal bacterial genome”, a jumping-off point for future synthetic species. All of these species would fall under Anthropobiota, as long as the genetic material is entirely synthetic. If not, that’s just genetic engineering.
Anthropobiota would be located outside the root of the Tree of Life. It would be a complementary Tree, at first much smaller than the original. The Tree of Life contains between 10 million and 1 billion bacteria species, between 10 and 30 million animal species, and some unknown quantity of archaea. So quite a few new species would need to join Anthropobiota for it to rival the current Tree.
I seem to remember an accusation in some phylogenetics journal that a group of Archaea was outside the root of the Tree of Life, but I can’t find it for the life of me. Anyway, there could be two or more separate Trees of Life. Anthropobiota will be a new one. The Tree of Synthetic Life.
Two different species within Anthropobiota need not evolve from other species in the same group. Each one could be created from scratch, by scientists in a lab. Once we develop the technology to reliably and inexpensively synthesize long genomes from nucleic acid precursors, and swap them for native genomes, we’re in business. The flood gates for new species — both benign and malign — will open.
The Lifeboat Foundation A-Prize page is a foresightful effort to to put development of artificial life forms in the open, where it should be. It a reward to whoever creates the first life form that “must execute at least one synthetic nonbiological operation in order to complete its life cycle”.
On the A-Prize page, Dr. Alan H. Goldstein, Professor of Biomaterials at Alfred University, creates four classifications of life: Natural Biological, Genetically-Engineered Biological, Synthetic Biological, and Synthetic Nonbiological (Animat). According to his classification system, Mycoplasma laboratorium would fall into the third category: Synthetic Biological. It will not be eligible to collect the A-Prize, because that would require an organism that integrates an entirely nonbiological, consistent (over generation) element into its biological life cycle.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the creation of Mycoplasma laboratorium later this year. I hope that creating synthetic life stays expensive for at least a couple more decades.
