The Craig Venter Institute has used a system derived from the rapid DNA repair mechanisms of D. radiodurans to assemble synthetic DNA fragments into chromosomes, with the ultimate goal of producing a synthetic organism they call Mycoplasma laboratorium.
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As a consequence of its hardiness, it has been nicknamed Conan the Bacterium.
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It can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and is therefore known as a polyextremophile and has been listed as the world's toughest bacterium in The Guinness Book Of World Records.
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They translated the song "It's a Small World" into a series of DNA segments 150 base pairs long, inserted these into the bacteria, and were able to retrieve them without errors 100 bacterial generations later.
In 2011 Radman won the FEMS-Lwoff Award, given out by the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, for his research of DNA repair mechanism in Deinococcus radiodurans.