Craig Venter

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Craig Venter (2007)

John Craig Venter (* 14. October 1946 in Salt Lake City , Utah ) is a US -American biochemist and entrepreneur, whose company Celera Corporation first an entire human genome sequenced and succeeded as First, a genetic make themselves and in To plant a cell so that a viable bacterium could develop.

Venter and the Human Genome Project

In 1998, he founded Celera Corporation to map human genes through automated sequencing on the basis of private funding. This made Venter a direct competitor of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which has been running since 1990 and is publicly funded as an international research project.

In contrast to this, Celera Genomics made much faster progress in some areas, but did not work as systematically as HGP. The research results published by the latter were (also) of benefit to Venter's research, but hardly vice versa.

The relatively early sequencing of some genes was patented by Venter's company with the aim of new pharmaceutical products . In April 2000 Venter announced the complete decryption, applied for around 6,500 patents in October 2000 and published some of his results. Since then he has been considered a ruthless privatizer of common property in parts of the world ; on the other hand, he is credited with the substantial acceleration of this research area at many institutes. Thanks to his completely new approach, he won the race anyway.

Synthetic viral and bacterial genome

In 2003, Craig Venter's group reported that they were the first to assemble a viral genome - that of enterobacteriophage PhiX174 (ΦX174) - entirely in vitro from synthesized oligonucleotides. The virus particle (virion) of ΦX174 was also successfully assembled in vitro .

In 2005, Venter and members of his research team founded Synthetic Genomics Inc. to produce biofuels using modified or man-made microorganisms.

In 2007, a group of researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) succeeded in producing the genetic material of a bacterium completely synthetically for the first time . The model for the replica was the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium with one of the smallest known genomes of 582,970 base pairs ; Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0 was chosen as the name of the synthetic replica .

In 2010, researchers working with Craig Venter announced the manufacture of the artificial bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 . Previously, they had successfully synthesized the 1.08 million base pair genome of a laboratory strain of the pathogen causing lung disease in cattle, Mycoplasma mycoides , from raw chemical material and transferred it to a Mycoplasma capricolum bacterium that had previously been freed from DNA .

On March 24, 2016, Venter published results according to which he had created a synthetic bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3.0 with 473 genes, or 531,000 base pairs, which it needs to carry out all vital processes.

Awards

In 2002, Venter was honored with one of the privately given World Awards in Vienna ("World Health Award"). To protect the biodiversity of the Tangwaldes examined Venter the genes of the algae and the Tangs in the Sargasso Sea , from which he suspects there over 1000 undiscovered species. According to this, several thousand previously undescribed species could still be found in kelp forests around the world, especially in the ecologically important phytoplankton .

Venter received the Gabbay Award in 2000 and the Biotechnology Heritage Award in 2001 . In 2002 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize and a Gairdner Foundation International Award . He has also been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001, of the National Academy of Sciences since 2002 and of the American Philosophical Society since 2013 . In October 2009 he received the National Medal of Science for 2008 from the US President , which is considered the highest scientific award in the USA. In 2011 he was awarded the Dickson Prize in Medicine , and in 2012 the Dan David Prize . In 2015 Venter received the Leeuwenhoek Medal .

Publications

  • The man in the Geneva avenue. The day will come: The complete knowledge of the life processes is imminent this year. In: FAZ . April 8, 2000.
  • A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life , New York, Viking Adult 2007, ISBN 978-0-670-06358-1 .
  • Life from the Laboratory. The new world of synthetic biology , German by Sebastian Vogel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-087202-9 .

See also

literature

  • René Scheu: life owner. In: Swiss monthly books . Journal of Politics Economy Culture. Zurich 2007, issue 07/08 (July / August), p. 10. ISSN  0036-7400
  • Simone Rödder: The wave maker does not have to be a whisker: The man with the genome: Craig Venter is a media star, but for his colleagues he is still not a "feature writer". About reputation on the front and back stages of research. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 30, 2010, page N5

Web links

Commons : Craig Venter  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel : Genetic Research: Genetic Self-Portrait Article of September 3, 2007
  2. ↑ Stuart Fox: J. Craig Venter Institute creates first synthetic life form . May 21, 2010. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
  3. ↑ Tom Reynolds: Pricing human genes: the patent rush pushes on. In: Journal of the National Cancer Institute , Vol. 92, No. 2, 2000, pp. 96-97.
  4. ↑ Hamilton O. Smith, Clyde A. Hutchison, Cynthia Pfannkoch, J. Craig Venter: Generating a Synthetic Genome by Whole Genome Assembly: ΦX174 Bacteriophage from Synthetic Oligonucleotides . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 100, No. 26, 2003, pp. 15440-15445. bibcode : 2003PNAS..10015440S . doi : 10.1073 / pnas.2237126100 . PMID 14657399 . PMC 307586 (free full text).
  5. ↑ James E. Cherwa, Lindsey J. Organtini, Robert E. Ashley, Susan L. Hafenstein, Bentley A. Fane: In Vitro Assembly of the ΦX174 Procapsid from External Scaffolding Protein Oligomers and Early Pentameric Assembly Intermediates . In: Journal of Molecular Biology . 412, No. 3, 2011, pp. 387-396. doi : 10.1016 / j.jmb.2011.07.070 . PMID 21840317 .
  6. ↑ Website of the company Synthetic Genomics Inc., ( Memento of the original from November 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 25, 2009.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.syntheticgenomics.com
  7. ↑ Venter Institute assembles bacterial genome. Heise news, January 25, 2008.
  8. ^ Venter Institute Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome. ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. J. Craig Venter Institute press release January 24, 2008. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jcvi.org
  9. ^ Daniel G. Gibson et al .: Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome. In: Science . Volume 319, No. 5867, 2008, pp. 1215-1220, PMID 18218864 , doi: 10.1126 / science.1151721
  10. ^ Daniel G. Gibson et al .: Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome. In: Science. Volume 329, No. 5987, 2010, pp. 52-56, PMID 20488990 , doi: 10.1126 / science.1190719
  11. ↑ Life on the lowest level: genetic researcher Craig Venter creates artificial minimal cells. Deutschlandfunk , March 24, 2016, accessed on March 26, 2016 .
  12. ↑ What life needs. Telepolis , March 26, 2016, accessed April 1, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize Winners 2002
  14. ^ Member History: J. Craig Venter. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 7, 2018 (with biographical notes).
personal data
SURNAME Venter, Craig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Venter, J. Craig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Salt Lake City , Utah