Craig Venter Reflections: Building & Redesigning Genomes

The last bit of Craig Venter's career a followed, often a bit green with envy, was his work to build genomes. This all revolved around the Mycoplasma genitalium they had knocked out a genome as a victory lap after completing the first bacterial genome. This bug is held up as the bacterium with the smallest genome which can be grown in a defined medium. To first reconstruct an entire genome, with…