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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