been missing a third of what is essential to life". press coverage the project received a large amount of coverage from the press due to venter's showmanship, to the degree that jay keasling, a pioneering synthetic biologist and founder of amyris commented that "the only regulation we need is of my colleague's mouth". utility venter has argued that synthetic bacteria are a step towards creating organisms to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, and also to absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. george m. church, another pioneer in synthetic biology, has expressed the contrasting view that creating a fully synthetic genome is not necessary since e. coli grows more efficiently than m. genitalium even with all its extra dna; he commented that synthetic genes have been incorporated into e.coli to perform some of the above tasks. intellectual property the j. craig venter institute filed patents for the mycoplasma laboratorium genome (the "minimal bacterial genome") in the u.s. and internationally in 2006. the etc group, a canadian bioethics group, protested on the grounds that the patent was too broad in scope. similar projects from 2002 to 2010, a team at the hungarian academy of science created a strain of escherichia coli called mds42, which is now sold by scarab genomics of madison, wi under the name of "clean genome. e.coli", where 15% of the genome of the parental strain (e. coli k-12 mg1655) were removed to aid in molecular biology efficiency, removing is elements, pseudogenes and phages, resulting in better maintenance of plasmid-encoded toxic genes, which are often inactivated by transposons. biochemistry and replication machinery were not altered.