Now fast-forward to May of last year, when Venter and his team reported in Science (The Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome in Science), the successful generation of a cell directed entirely by a synthetic genome, programmed from a computer and synthesized piece by piece.

FORBES: Venter and the Vatican

The adult cell whose nucleus was transferred into the egg that became Dolly had a male imprinted genome that was inherited at birth and copied to every cell of the donor's body.

ECONOMIST: A ��virgin birth�� in mice

Even Dolly the sheep, who was produced by cloning via somatic nuclear cell transfer, benefited from a male imprinted genome.

ECONOMIST: A ��virgin birth�� in mice

This is because of molecular switches that turn parts of the genome on and off depending on what the cell in question is up to.

ECONOMIST: Human genomics

Whereas 62% of the genome may be turned into finished transcripts in some cell or other, only about 22% of the DNA ends up in such transcripts in the typical cell.

ECONOMIST: Human genomics

Indeed studies have demonstrated that such cell lines are either depleted of mtDNA (12) or that the mitochondrial genome is highly mutated (13).

FORBES: Big Study Linking Chronic Fatigue To Virus May Be Fatally Flawed

The idea behind the efforts to make an artificial bacterium was, in essence, to treat a large synthetic genome as a giant version of Phi-X174 and use it to hijack a cell which had had all its DNA removed.

ECONOMIST: Artificial lifeforms

The genetics of mitochondria are most peculiar: several different strains of mitochondria, each with its own slightly different genome, can co-exist in a single body, or even in a single cell.

ECONOMIST: Trojan DNA

The monumental effort to sequence the entire human genome -- to spell out the 3 billion or so combinations of those letters in a cell's DNA -- is keeping a lot of academic and commercial laboratories busy.

FORBES: Biology in silico