What is the first microorganism created in lab?

Answer 1

The first microorganisms to be used in the laboratory were found living wild in the environment.

Since then, scientists have been breeding microorganisms that are more standardised and/or useful to scientific investigation. Initially this would have consisted of selecting those organisms that displayed useful or interesting characteristics (phenotypes), much like selective breeding of dogs or livestock. With the advent of modern genetic engineering, it has been possible to actively introduce more sophisticated and complex modifications to our lab microorganisms (such as deleting entire genes or adding tagged or altered copies of genes; for example GFP tagging proteins to allow us to see them with a microscope). Two commonly used examples of these organisms are our lab strains of E. coli and Baker's Yeast.

However, all of these organisms have their ancestry in organisms caught in the wild, and cannot be termed "created in the lab" in their entirety. Our knowledge of what is necessary to make an organism from scratch is not complete; there are essential parts of all organisms that we do not understand the function of. Nor do we have the means to manufacture a cell from scratch.

In recent years it has become theoretically possible to synthesise a whole genome from scratch and place it into an existing cell with its genome removed. Though this cell is far from entirely artificial when it is made, over time its natural contents will be replaced with things made on the instructions in our synthetic genome, and at that stage one could argue that this is an organism "created in the lab". If this experiment were done successfully, it is likely that the organism created would be very similar to E. coli, a very common and well understood species of lab bacteria, as most of the genes we synthesise would likely be copies of E. coli genes.

Wherever we get our source genes from to make a synthetic copy for our "created in the lab" micro-organism, the intellectual property, so to speak, still lies with Mother Nature rather than us. If we want to create an organism truly designed and built by man, we have to get a lot better at understanding how proteins fold and form functional units. This technology is still very much in its infancy. It will be a long time before we are able to design completely new enzymes that fulfil all of the many functions of life. Even if we could, there would be very little economic point, seen as evolution has already come up with some pretty good solutions of its own, but if we felt that attaining a mastery of Biology sufficient to synthesise it from scratch with no input from existing biological systems was a target worth trying to reach, for intellectual rather than practical reasons, it may be possible one day in the future.

This day has not yet come, nor do I expect it to for some time.