UK Scientists Plan to Construct Synthetic Human Genetic Material From Scratch

'Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch,' reports the Guardian, 'to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies.'

Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to understand how the code operates.

Armed with the insights, scientists hope to devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections. 'The information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease,' said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the project at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge...

For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London... Embedded in the project is a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues that arise from making genomes in the laboratory, led by Prof Joy Zhang at the University of Kent. 'We're a little way off having anything tangible that can be used as a therapy, but this is the time to start the discussion on what we want to see and what we don't want to see,' said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.