Scientists create simple synthetic cell

While this top-down approach (removing unnecessary parts of an organism and keeping the essential parts) is really impressive, I personally find the bottom-up approach more interesting: building an &quot;artificial cell&quot; by adding all the transcription and translation machinery into a lipid vesicle, allowing for this &quot;artificial cell&quot; to produce proteins to do various tasks. For example, people have developed &quot;artificial &#x2F;synthetic cells&quot; that communicate with each other [1] and even bacteria [2]. There has also been some recent study on dividing cell-sized lipid vesicles with membrane proteins [3]. I know there were some comments about science has achieving a biological “Hello World”, and I think this sort of work is what is going to get us there.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nchem&#x2F;journal&#x2F;v9&#x2F;n5&#x2F;abs&#x2F;nchem.2644.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nchem&#x2F;journal&#x2F;v9&#x2F;n5&#x2F;abs&#x2F;nchem.2644.ht...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.acs.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1021&#x2F;acsami.8b10029" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.acs.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1021&#x2F;acsami.8b10029</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-020-14696-0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-020-14696-0</a>

&gt; Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do.<p>This gives you an appreciation of how little we know. I work in bioinformatics, and every one in the field will tell you that there&#x27;s been an explosion in the number of datasets. However, try finding recent data on your condition of interest! The number of experiments grows incredibly fast, but we&#x27;re not there yet to build a comprehensive model even of a simple organism.

This is an interesting result. Basically cellular biologists debugging cells the same way folks who don&#x27;t understand how a program works debug it, by chopping parts off until it fails and then adding back bits one by one until it works again :-).<p>At some point, not today and perhaps not in the next 20 years, humans will understand exactly how cells and DNA &quot;work&quot; from first principles to final behavior. At that point, humans will either cease to age and never suffer from disease (Venter would have liked that), or humanity will be wiped out by a malicious organism that is designed by a deranged practitioner.<p>Yet another technology produced Lady or the Tiger challenge.

JCVI-Syn3A has been around for a while. Here is the genome sequence from 2018 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;nuccore&#x2F;1241355755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;nuccore&#x2F;1241355755</a><p>Back at FreeGenes we synthesized all of the genes from this organism with codon optimization for Escherichia coli (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stanford.freegenes.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;gene-sets&#x2F;products&#x2F;jcvi_syn3-0#description" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stanford.freegenes.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;gene-sets&#x2F;product...</a>), the workhorse of synthetic biology. If you combine the right transcriptional and translational elements, you should be able to build a fully modular genome from this gene set! We also did a couple other organisms in pursuit of this modular genome. As a nice bonus, you can also easily do in-vitro cell-free experiments since the codon tables are nice (and I&#x27;ve heard from Kate Adamala&#x27;s group that JCVI-Syn3 has pretty bad cell free, though that was a couple years ago)<p>It&#x27;s important to note that JCVI-Syn3A has a LOT of problems when it comes to its practical use. There just isn&#x27;t enough energy being put into making an understandable and practical modular&#x2F;minimal genome.

So can we say science has finally achieved a biological “Hello World”?

I imagine that from engineering POV, having self-replicating cells that will also do the useful work won&#x27;t be optimal. This self-contained single-cell system was the only one that could work in the wild initially, but after a while even in natural systems like our bodies we have cells (like those red ones from our blood) that are produced by specialized tissues (red bone marrow), are designed with a specific function and with a simplified structure (like to be small, without cell nucleus), and disposed by other specific tissues (in the liver). If I had to design a system (and a business) it would involve printing specialized (non-replicating) work cells and some control&#x2F;disposal mechanisms. The research focus on simplest living <i>and self-replicating</i> cells looks interesting but not that much oriented on any practical purposes.

So grey goo version 0.01?

Interesting development. We already use cellular machinery to make some drugs like human insulin made with genetically modified bacteria. I think an application for this type of development might be nano construction of advanced materials that are hard to manufacture in quantity, like an engineered bacteria to build sheets of the materials as long as it has a supply of graphite and minimal nutrition.

Stupid question from someone who has zero idea about this field :<p>What are the chances they unknowingly create a new virus&#x2F; bacteria for which no known defenses are present. How is this probability mitigated during design process and what protocols are followed for ensuring this doesn&#x27;t happen. I did read about bio safety levels, but I feel they themselves could be bypassed.

How much data is contained in the 500 genes of this cell?<p>I&#x27;m kinda curious the minimum number of bytes it takes to make a living cell.

Ahh boy that title. Clicking on the link to probably realize that this is totally harmless and my initial reaction is due to how much I&#x27;ve been stuck inside for a year.

Could they make cells that can regulate, if there is abundance of X = do something? I mean that would end a lot of problems. Starting with diabetes.

So at some point we can just print humans (or better organism) making organic life obsolete.

Stunning and beautiful: We are on our way to truly intelligently designed life.

Are we creating new organisms that can kill us?