Synthetic Bacterial Genome

I'm a little late with this, but here's the lead from the J. Craig Venter Institute press release:

ROCKVILLE, MD—January 24, 2008—A team of 17 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. This work, published online today in the journal Science by Dan Gibson, Ph.D., et al, is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, which is ongoing at the JCVI, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.

Here's the Science article.

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Craig Venter was a participant in the 2007 Edge annual summer event: Life: What A concept. A transcript of the event has been published by Edge as a downloadable PDF. Here's the introduction to his discussion:

I have come to think of life in much more a gene-centric view than
even a genome-centric view, although it kind of oscillates. And
when we talk about the transplant work, genome-centric becomes
more important than gene-centric. From the first third of the
Sorcerer II expedition we discovered roughly 6 million new genes
that has doubled the number in the public databases when we put
them in a few months ago, and in 2008 we are likely to double that
entire number again. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the
divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene
discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if
you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can
have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet.
One question is, can we extrapolate back from this data set to
describe the most recent common ancestor. I don't necessarily buy
that there is a single ancestor. It’s counterintuitive to me. I think we
may have thousands of recent common ancestors and they are not
necessarily so common.

[Here's a video of Craig Venter giving the Richard Dimbleby lecture, A DNA-driven world.]