Bacterial genome swapping -Lauren

First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changes One Species To Another

This is pretty cool: researchers at the J Craig Venter Institute have transplanted the chromosome from one simple species of bacteria into another, successfully transforming the bacteria into the other species. They purposefully chose species (Mycoplasma capricolum and Mycoplasma mycoides) that have very small genomes, and marked the genome of M. mycoides so that bacteria with its chromosome turned blue. This allowed them to identify colonies of M. capricolum that successfully transformed into M. mycoides.

The photograph shows colonies of transformed bacteria.

This article (about the same experiment) says that only 1 of every 150,000 cells is successfully transformed, so this is still a very inefficient process.