Technical obsticals/difficulties (Score 1)

I'm surpised no one has commented on the technical obsticals/difficulties associated with this project. It says they have already "hollowed out" the organism to the point where it has a mimimal set of genes in the previous work. Exactly what is the next step that they plan to take? Looking for ways to cut the number down further? Or are they actually planning on engineering new genes to take the place of 2 old genes? If so, will they try introducing genes from other (presumably prokaryotic) organisms, or engineering them de novo? (which seems pretty far fetched) Also, how will they define success? How will they no when there is no possible way to get the number of genes any smaller? How about promoters, operators and other regulatory sequences that aren't actually transcribed/translated? Are they going to try and cut these down too? They could try and aggregate genes together into an operon to cut down the number of promoters. Also they might be able to delete an operator and its associated inducer/repressor without killing the cell- just making it less efficient. And finally, how efficient does the thing need to be to qualify as alive? What environment must the organism survive in to qualify? This seems to be a key issue, which is fairly arbitrary. But then in biology, many things are.