A few weeks ago, Jason Kelly explained in his post how Itaya and colleagues (2007) assembled the complete 135 kb rice chloroplast circular genome starting from a collection of 5-6 kb fragments and using sequential in vivo homologous recombination in Bacillus

http://blog-msb.embo.org/blog/2008/01/jcvi10.html

A while back I wrote about Synthia and now a recent article published in Science shows some more of the remarkable work being done at the Craig Venter Institute with bacteria and their genetics.The research I’m referring seems to take a good step forward

http://my.biotechlife.net/2007/08/21/sr-anderson-mi-genome-es-su-genome/

For the past few days I've been rushing around, first to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to talk to some people at the Marine Biological Laboratory about the E. coli book, and then on an infinite chain of connecting flights to come out to Aspen to participate in

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/06/30/hither_and_yon.php

The folks at the Craig Venter Institute, having patented the technology for creating a synthetic organism, now have at least part of the process working: they report that they can take an entire bacterial genome from one organism and pop it into another, essentially

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/06/genome-transplantation-in-bacteria.php

Two science news articles (here and here) about J. Craig Venter's efforts to hack the genome (or perhaps, more broadly, hacking microbiology) reminded me of a few other articles about his goals. The two articles I ran across today concern a rather cool experiment

http://cs.unm.edu/~aaron/blog/archives/2007/06/hacking_microbi.htm

The guy who raced the government to a draw sequencing the human genome took a step toward synthesizing life yesterday, when he and his colleagues reported transforming one organism into another. J. Craig Venter and scientists at the institute he runs were able

http://feeds.wsjonline.com/~r/wsj/health/feed/~3/128963263/