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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

#191

Post by im3w1l »

bouchard wrote: post #126
vintagedave wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons. Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response. Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

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

#193

Post by zchrykng »

FloorEgg wrote: post #174
bomewish wrote: post #173

The “from scratch” is doing a lot of work here!

I don't think I had ever heard the phrase "x is doing a lot of work here" until about a year ago, from Claude, which seems to say it's lot. Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it? Are you Claude? Or just a coincidence?

It is a common phrase and has been for a very long time though has increased over the last 6 years or so.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...

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

#194

Post by dyauspitr »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #78

You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race. Instead, your learn about Biotic. It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084. Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a reli…

Humans have the power to self reproduce though. I don’t believe anything short of an engineered disease could wipe out all of humanity at this point and it has to happen soon before we figure out how to fix all of our problems using genetic engineering.

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

#195

Post by jibal »

Aachen wrote: post #81
oliverx0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology

Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a li…

> Exoplanets also aren't planets.

That is flatly wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet

"An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System."

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

#196

Post by Lerc »

im3w1l wrote: post #191
bouchard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons. Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response. Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

Nobody knows how another person will see something with their eyes.

What appears to be obvious and revolutionary to one person may not be so to all.

Review is precisely to protect against the importance and accuracy of a work being decided by the person who is most invested in it being so.

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

#197

Post by Kotlopou »

JanJedryszek wrote: post #184

I;m one of the co-founders, AMA :)

Hi, thanks, and very cool work (assuming it eventually holds up in peer review)!

A few things that confused me while trying to read the paper:

- There's two different methods of cell division mentioned -- mechanical extrusion and the autonomous, protein-driven division. Most of the results (e.g. the five generations) focus on the mechanically driven one, while the autonomous one is more "lifelike". Does the autonomous division have a higher failure rate, or can you get the same results with it as well?

- It's mentioned that the bottleneck for survival of many generations is ribozomes degrading, but also that ribozomes are supplied from the outside. Do the degraded ribozomes actively harm the cell? Or is there some other reason why they cannot be replenished?

- You say that after 5 generations, only 30% of the cells have the correct genome, and it's presented like a problem -- but 30% of 2^5 is more than 10, so this sounds like more than enough for continued survival. Is there something missing in this train of thought? Perhaps other failures that can kill the cell?

And some questions about the implications:

- Do you think that the genome you use is already close to minimal? AFAIK a lot of the minimal organisms found in the wild are parasites of some sort, getting most of their complex molecules from the outside, which is a similar spirit to this (a rich medium and the cell "just" self-duplicating). If the multiple plasmids are causing trouble (per the previous point), would it make sense to try and get rid of some of them?

- Are those minimal genes somehow interpretable -- as in "you need functions X, Y, and Z and cannot avoid them by using a better medium"?

- Do you think this is a plausible stage of very early life?

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

#198

Post by krunck »

petcat wrote: post #125

The people behind it: https://biotic.org/ > Biotic is a public-benefit nonprofit research organization developing chemically and functionally defined synthetic cells. Biotic's mission is to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering. Our goal is to ensure that all people and the planet benefit from world‑leading biotechnologies soon enough to matter. We conduct and support public‑benefit r…

Everything they are doing is dual use. Thus I don't feel the benefit.

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

#199

Post by Terr_ »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #78

You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race. Instead, your learn about Biotic. It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084. Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a reli…

You stumble across another article from 2226: It describes how the Earth was consumed by a grey-goo apocalypse of nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, so that no pore of its surface is untouched by reservoirs of rogue units, all of which are in a constant arms-race of development and combat. Some have formed groups that construct colossal moving megastructures piloted by inscrutable hive-minds.

The article notes that this event actually occurred ~3.5 billion years ago, and suggests that the current hive-mind should buy a subscription.

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

#200

Post by jibal »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #128
hparadiz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exoplanets also aren't planets. Imagine writing this.

What they meant when they said "planets" was the 8 (previously 9, previously to that 8, previously 7...) known and named planets in our own solar system. A hypothetical "Journal of Planets" that was actually about solar system astronomy wouldn't necessarily have known what to do with a new paper about 51 Pegasi b published 30 years ago. They're thinking "when we said planets, we actually always meant solar system pla…

> What they meant when they said "planets"

Who is "they", and how do you know what they meant?

The relevant fact is that the claim "Exoplanets also aren't planets" is simply wrong -- exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.

> The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.

They aren't saying that, and that isn't true.

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