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European scientists have begun work on a project to create simple life forms from scratch in the laboratory, taking advantage of theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with nonliving chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
“MiniLife” project worth 13 million euros, funded by European Research Council It involves biologists and chemists from several universities, and they could be the first in the world to reach the minimum standards for an artificial living system.
“Success would constitute a historic achievement in basic science,” said Iwerz Szathmary, director of the Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Harvard University. Parmenides Foundation In Germany, he is the principal investigator of an ERC grant. “Creating new living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”
John Sutherland, who works in early life chemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing global effort to “create minimal living systems”.
“This is driven by a lifelong desire to understand how life arose on Earth and whether it could also have arisen elsewhere in the observable universe,” added Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project.
Other artificial life researchers are working on the known building blocks of life on Earth, especially the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. In contrast, the ERC project aims to start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves a product of evolution.
“We abstract known life forms because they are highly evolved creatures, and we simplify them to arrive at a simplified formulation,” Szathmary said.
Researchers at MiniLife are evaluating four systems that could be developed, individually or in combination, to become the foundation of minimal living. They are all “autocatalytic”, a property necessary for self-replication in which a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own products.
One of the candidates is formal reaction. This process, discovered in the 19th century, turns a very simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex series of sugar molecules. When the reaction is fueled by formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets varies depending on the composition of the sugars within them.
“Some grow faster and divide more quickly than others,” said Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife researcher at the École Supérieure de Physique et Chemistry Industrielle in Paris. “We ended up with something that is equivalent to fitness in biology, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical system.”
A formus-based system should be able to display reliable heritability—the transmission of acquired characteristics from generation to generation—perhaps in conjunction with one of the other systems being evaluated.
Griffiths said the six-year timing is ambitious, and he is optimistic that the project will be able to “demonstrate primitive Darwinian evolution.” At a minimum, this includes a system that can switch between two genetic states in different environments, similar to the famous peppered butterfly whose wings are white in clean environments and black when it lives in polluted places with dark surfaces.
Siegbrin Otto, a professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said his primary motivation was “fascination with the nature and origin of life.” Although the molecules we develop may not be the ones from which life began on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be of great importance for understanding what happened next.
Last month, an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented risks” posed by another field of synthetic biology. They said that “mirror life” – manufactured bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes – could overwhelm the defenses of humans, other animals and plants.
When asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said his creations were “unlikely to have any utility outside of highly controlled laboratory conditions” and pose no potential danger to the public.
However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research. “It's time to think more about the future that the research is likely to lead to,” Otto said.
