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For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

quantamagazine.org

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Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#21

Post by TSiege »

senkora wrote: post #17
TSiege wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_ferme…

It seems like this cell barely evolves, because the system they built for duplicating the DNA makes very few errors. Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production. For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fun…

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#22

Post by yread »

bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#26

Post by dyauspitr »

joh6nn wrote: post #24

For the love of all things holy, can we not do these kinds of experiments on the same planet we live on?

Oh shut up, can we get some frontier stuff going without some doom and gloom. All this knowledge for all these years and next to no progress.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#30

Post by ezst »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to u…

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