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_fermentation

Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.

“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”

Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.

While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.

The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.

Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.

The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).

Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.

The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.

> That is the holy grail?

If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.

(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)

Have you not seen Jurassic Park?

Man, I am so tired of the cynicism around here.

Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.

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

Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.

> That is the holy grail?

At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.

We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.

That is absolutely fucking wild.

Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

What a time to be alive.

Yes, this is definitely awesome.

In eukaryotic cells (your cells) the cytoskeleton is needed to shape the cell, position DNA, and most importantly for this study, separate daughter cells allowing replication. Think of the complexity here, you need to make compartments to separate the copies of the genetic material, physically separated during division. Microtubules assemble the "mitotic spindle" and then pulls the sister chromatids apart from each other. After the chromosomes separate, other cytoskeletal filaments (actin and myosin) form a contractile ring, which tightens to create a cleavage furrow. The membrane pinches inward until the cell splits in two.

Bacteria work slightly differently, since they don't have a eukaryotic cytoskeleton, but they do have cytoskeletal-like proteins (FtsZ), since they divide by building the cell wall inward (I am not an expert on bacteria lol).

SpudCell doesn't have a cytoskeleton, so instead it relies on a physical membrane-rupture strategy. It makes membrane proteins from its own DNA (a-hemolysin), which inserts into the membrane. They help fuse with feeder liposomes for growth. For division, these proteins crowd on the membrane surface, creating mechanical stress which leads to membrane instability, which then splits on its own.

Terrible, the cytoskeleton is the best bit of the cell!

(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)

> aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps

Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.

It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.

I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...

Or another take, life isn't all that special if we can make it this easily.

We have always theorized the start of life but this could actively show that life could have started on a rock floating in space given enough time. No sky daddy and no aliens necessary!

(opens a new tab)

"And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]

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.

I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?

Neither. This is a single cell.

Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.

From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.

Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.

Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)

Definitely. An implication of several strands of idealism is that we will be able to create artificial life (with consciousness)... it will just look like biology.

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

> “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.

That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.

The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.

TL;DR politics breaks everything.

let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)

There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.

Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.

The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.