Creating of the first artificial cell was announced on May, 21, 2010. Initiator and the governor of several years lasting project was famous Craig Venter. In 2000 he and Francis Collins announced mapping of the human genome in presence of the president Bill Clinton.
The project began in 2005 from debugging the method of gene assembling. On this stage a virus FX174 genome was created. Next, a chromosome of Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria was assembled which has the smallest genome coding just 485 protein molecula. Bacteria remained to be alive after leaving only 382 genes. That is why this microorganism were primarily planned to create artificially. However, the culture of these bacteria growed slowly and they started to create Mycoplasma mycoides.
They successfully transplanted mycoid genome in Mycoplasma capricolumу cell in 2007. The only thing remained to do was to synthesize a mycoid chromosome. Assembling of such a big genome was organized with the aid of Echerichia coli bacteria (up to 100 thousands nucleotides) and yeasts (final processing, about 1 mln. nucleotides). After artificial genome was planted into Mycoplasma capricolumy cell followed by the preliminary genetic material cleaning the cell started to reproduce as micoid. Hence, this is only genome that can be called artificial in the first artificial cell. And such ambiguity is saved up to a moment when they learned how to synthetize all cellular machinery. Let's wish new successes to Craig and follow on works of his research institute (Craig Venter Institute – www.jcvi.org).