Genome Project-write (GP-write) is an open international research project that plans to reduce costs of engineering and testing large genomes in cell lines for the purpose of understanding the blueprint of life. GP-write includes whole genome engineering of human cell lines and other organisms that have relevance to agriculture and public health.
A few weeks prior to the Science publication, a meeting that was closed to the press was held in May 2016 by George Church and collaborators along with 130 invited scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and government officials which discussed the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize large genomes in vitro. The private nature of the meeting was met with some criticism, with Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University an Drew Endy of Stanford University publishing an article in CosmosCosmos documenting their disapproval.
Jef BoekeJef Boeke (New York University), George Church (Harvard) and Andrew Hessel (Autodesk Research) pubished a proposal in Science in 2016 to synthesize the entire genomes from scratch. Initially the term the Human Genome Project-Write was used to refer what they consider the next step after the sequencing of the human genome, which they refer to as the Human Genome Project-Read (HGP-write). HGP-write will be a critical core activity within GP-write and will focus on synthesizing human genomes in whole or in part.
Ethical, policy and pubic education components of GP-write are being considered by experts in collaboration with the Center. HGP-write projects will be explicitly limited to cell culturecell culture and organoids derived from cells. For HGP-write there will be an expanded examination of ethical, legal and social implications.
A few weeks prior to the Science publication, a meeting that was closed to the press was held in May 2016 by George Church and collaborators along with 130 invited scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and government officials which discussed the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize large genomes in vitro. The private nature of the meeting was met with some criticism, with Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University an Drew EndyDrew Endy of Stanford University publishing an article in Cosmos documenting their disapproval.
A community-wide project to produce “ultra-safe” versions of human cells for cell therapy or drug production is underway. The idea is to produce versions of human cells that are recoded so that they resist viruses, radiation, freezing, aging or cancer. Synthetic genome recoding is the process of changing the three-letter DNADNA sequences called codons which encode amino acids, building blocks of proteins. This is possible because there are multiple codons for the same amino acid and redundant codons can be swapped while preserving vital function. If a redundant codon is eliminated along with the transfer RNA (tRNA) that translates the deleted codon, the cell will not be able to translate DNA sequences with the eliminated codon. The cell will still produce proteins with the same amino acid sequence but viral DNA entering the cell could not be translated since the virus contains the eliminated codon(s). It is estimated that at least 400,000 changes to the genome would be required to make human cells resistant to viruses.