title: Building the blueprint of life.
abstract: With recent breakthroughs in experimental microbiology making it possible to synthesize and implant an entire genome to create a living cell, the challenge of constructing a working blueprint for the first truly minimal synthetic organism is more important than ever. Here we review the significant progress made in the design and creation of a minimal organism. We discuss how comparative genomes, gene essentiality data, naturally small genomes, and metabolic modeling are all being applied to produce a catalogue of the biological functions essential for life. We compare the minimal gene sets from three published sources with functions identified in 13 existing gene essentiality datasets. We examine how genome-scale metabolic models have been applied to design a minimal metabolism for growth in simple and complex media. Additionally, we survey the progress of efforts to construct a minimal organism, either through implementation of combinatorial deletions in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli or through the synthesis and implantation of synthetic genomes.
authors.affiliation: Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA. cshenry@uchicago.edu
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Henry
authors.forename: Ross
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Overbeek
authors.forename: Rick L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Stevens
mesh_terms: D055028:Comparative Genomic Hybridization; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D020043:Genes, Essential; D005818:Genetic Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D045704:Mycoplasma genitalium / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial