There was one study that was done with bare RNA replicating in the presence of RNA polymerase and a free supply of mononucleotides. There was no selection pressure except, sort of, what the polymerases liked to copy. Under a wide range of initial conditions, it zeroed in on a little fragment that basically just had polymerase binding sites. See "Spiegelman's Monster". But this doesn't say anything about the minimal genome required to make a cellular living from, say, the minimal glucose+salts medium. On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 6:07 PM, Brent Meeker <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
I don't think it's been done with a bacterium, but it's been done with an RNA virus replicating in the presence of mono-nucleotides. They started with a viral RNA of 4500 base pairs and found an "optimized" one of 220. I think this is the paper, but I don't have access to it.
Wagner, A., and P. F. Schuster. 1999. Viral RNA and evolved mutational robustness. J. Exp. Zool. 285:119-127
Brent
On 5/12/2016 10:38 AM, Allan Wechsler wrote:
A very late reply to this interesting thread. I am curious to know whether any biologists have tried letting evolution do this work: that is, breed some well-understood model organism (almost certainly E. coli K12 or something similar) and select for small genome. I think genome size can be easily calculated by electrophoresis. This ought to be easy to mechanize, and with a generation time of 17 minutes I suspect that evolution would start whittling away at the 4.6 Mbp genome pretty quickly. Leave it running for a few months and see how close it can get to this 531 Kbp goal line. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would surprise us.
2016-03-27 13:02 GMT-04:00 Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com>:
http://www.livescience.com/54165-artificial-bacterium-has-smallest-genome.ht...
531K base pairs.
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