Influential: Craig Venter claims we will make artificial life this year. Scientists are only months away from  creating artificial life, it was claimed yesterday. Dr Craig Venter – one of the world’s most famous and controversial biologists – said his U.S. researchers have overcome one of the last big hurdles to making a synthetic organism.

The first artificial lifeform is likely to be a simple man-made bacterium that proves that the technology can work.

But it will be followed by more complex bacteria that turn coal into cleaner natural gas, or algae that can soak up carbon dioxide and convert it into fuels.

They could also be used to create new vaccines and antibiotics.

The prediction came after a breakthrough by the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland.

Researchers successfully transferred
the DNA of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it and then transferred it into another bacterial cell.

The pioneering ‘gene swap’ was performed on a simple species of bacteria called Mycoplasma mycoides.

Carole Lartigue and colleagues removed the bacteria’s entire genome and inserted it into the yeast – an organism that is distant from bacteria on the tree of life.

Yeast is easier to manipulate in the lab and this process allowed the team to alter the genes – in this case, deleting one gene not necessary for bacteria to live.

High hopes: Synthetic microbes could clean up toxic waste

The cell went on to divide normally, producing a new healthy strain of the modified bacteria.

In January, the team created the entire genetic code of a new bacterium. They now hope to transfer such artificial DNA into a host cell to create a new species, the journal Science reported.

Yesterday Dr Venter said: ‘Assuming we don’t make any errors, I think it should work and we should have the first synthetic species by the end of the year.’

The team successfully transplanted the genome of one bacteria into another for the first time in 2007.

They then created the first entirely man-made genome. But previous attempts to introduce the synthetic genome into another organism and take control of the new bacteria all failed.

Now the team has harnessed a biological process called methylation – where special molecules are added onto the cell’s DNA – to protect them from viruses.

Writing in Science, they said their method might be used to tinker with the genetics of a range of bacteria that have been difficult to engineer.

‘Many medically or industrially important microbes are difficult to manipulate genetically,’ they wrote.

‘This has severely limited our understanding of pathogenesis and our ability to exploit the knowledge of microbial biology on a practical level.

Breakthrough: New DNA was protected by a process called methylation (step 5)

‘We hope that the cycle presented here can be applied to other species, to help solve these problems.’

Ms Lartigue, who is now at the Biotechnology Industry Organisation, said there may have already identified a direct application in the development of animal vaccines.

The Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium they used causes a disease called pleuropneumonia in cattle and goats.

‘There is an urgent need for vaccines,’ they wrote. ‘This technology could accelerate the construction of live vaccine strains.’

Dr Venter, named as an author in the paper and who founded the institute, is working to make genetically manipulated or completely synthetic organisms.

Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp signed a $600million (£362million) deal with Dr Venter’s privately held Synthetic Genomics Inc to work on making biofuel from algae.

Venter has said he hopes to manipulate organisms to produce biofuels, clean up toxic waste and sequester carbon to slow global warming.

Researchers already regularly engineer life forms by adding or deleting genes.

Neanderthal man has taken a step closer to once again roaming the earth after scientists unlocked the genetic make-up of our closest relative for the first time.

Researchers announced that they had finally managed to reconstruct the entire DNA of the former species in a world breakthrough that follows a similar feat for the mammoth.

Now they believe the milestone could help discover why Neanderthal man, a short hairier version of a human, became extinct 30,000 years ago.

It also raises the possibility – although played down by scientists – that the code could be used to clone a living version of the creature.

Professor Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, sequenced more than one billion DNA fragments extracted from three fossilised Neanderthal bones found in a cave in Croatia.

They believe they have managed to identify the basic structure of the code – more than 60 per cent – and now aim to fill in the gaps using computer models that compare it to human and chimpanzee DNA.

The DNA also provide insights into how the genome of this extinct form differed from that of modern humans and also highlight genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago.

Neanderthals were the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago.

For more than a hundred years, palaeontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover their evolutionary relationship to modern humans.

Prof Paabo, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA research, made the first contribution to the understanding of our genetic relationship to Neanderthals when he sequenced their mitochondrial DNA, or the engine room of the cell, in 1997.

He announced the latest milestone at the opening of the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

In order to reliably compare the Neanderthal DNA sequences to those of humans and chimpanzees, the group based in Leipzig has performed detailed studies of where chemical damage tends to occur in the ancient DNA and how it causes errors in the DNA sequences.

The researchers found that such errors occur most frequently towards the ends of molecules and that the vast majority of them are due to a particular modification of one of the bases in the DNA that occurs over time in fossil remains.

They then applied this knowledge to identify which of the DNA fragments from the fossils come from the Neanderthal genome and which from other microorganisms that have contaminated the bones during the thousands of years they lay buried in the caves.

They have also developed novel and more sensitive computer algorithms to put the Neandertal DNA fragments in order and compare them to the human genome.

Inevitably the breakthrough will evoke the idea of cloning a live version of the extinct creature.

Back in November when a team of experts announced they had sequenced the DNA of a mammoth, they brought up the possibility.

However other scientists played down the chances of it becoming reality.

Aside from the moral questions such an act would provoke they pointed out that it would be “like trying to build a car with only 80 per cent of the parts, and knowing that some of them are already broken”.