J. Craig Venter Institute has gotten one step closer to creating a synthetic life form. In a paper published in Science Express, the Institute reported that it succeeded in morphing one type of bacteria into another, according to Bloomberg. "I believe this work has important implications in better understanding the fundamentals of biology to enable the final stages of our work in creating and booting up a synthetic genome," said Hamilton Smith, one of the leaders of the JCVI team. He added, "this is possibly one of the most important new findings in the field of synthetic genomics." Release | Report