
How Biologists Are Creating Life-Like Cells from Scratch - gotocake
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07289-x
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olliej
To clarify the exciting headline:

They’re creating cell sized bubbles out of cell like materials, and they’re
able to get things inside them.

The opening paragraphs make it sound like they cells can split themselves, but
what they’ve actually done is make a chip the can split them. Likewise
construction of a cell is done entirely by chip fluidics to create what are
afaict lipid bubbles, and they can use similar tech to force non spherical
shapes.

~~~
nine_k
You may need very simple mechanics / chemistry to achieve spontaneous
division:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coacervate#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coacervate#History)

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mothsonasloth
One small but exciting step in the right direction.

Can you imagine in the future, we could have translations from logical code to
biochemical pathways. You could specify the dependencies of a cell you are
building in a similar fashion to (maven, npm, make).

Using bioinformatics data to configure your cells behaviour.

There would be compilation errors were cells would not be stable or
materialise, and runtime errors in which a metabolic or other type of pathway
fails, causing the cell to throw an exception (dies/ or emits other action).

I would truly relish the moment when my cell gets a virus.

~~~
epmaybe
Seems like synthetic biology is a field you should look into! It's very
exciting!

~~~
mothsonasloth
Ill need to look into it.

My background is in Biomed but I joined the dark side and became a computer
scientist instead.

~~~
epmaybe
I wouldn't call it the dark side, I think there can always be an overlap in
one's skillset.

~~~
dnautics
having been a biochemist (and maybe going back) but also a professional
programmer, I am very pessimistic about this.

One time, though, I used ruby to scrape a chinese website where they made
'public' the genome of an organism. They clearly weren't interested in
actually making it public (as the sequences were very hard to pull), and after
we had gotten the data they made it impossible and took down announcements
that it was public, so sometimes real computer skills are welcome!

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inciampati
The article speculates that it will be hard to get these synthetic cellular
systems to evolve, even if they manage to self replicate and survive given
their initial rational design. I don't see this as a problem if they really
can be made self sustaining. If the cells replicate then they are already
implementing an evolutionary process. We just need to be sure that mutations
can arise due to replication error or DNA damage. But if they don't replicate
then human designers mediate their evolution. This just seems so
straightforward to me. Am I missing something?

~~~
lisper
If they don't replicate, they aren't alive. Replication is the defining
characteristic of life.

~~~
undersuit
If we're going to split hairs like that then blood cells and the neurons of
some species of adult fairy wasps are not alive.

And if you response is that the rest of the organism fulfills the self
replication process through sexual reproduction, then why can't these cells
being assisted by an outside process like the splitting chip be considered
alive in whole like an animal is?

~~~
lisper
> blood cells and the neurons of some species of adult fairy wasps are not
> alive

That's right, they aren't. You hair and fingernails aren't alive either. Nor
is your clothing despite the fact that that too is part of the human
phenotype. [1]

> why can't these cells being assisted by an outside process like the
> splitting chip be considered alive in whole like an animal is?

Because the splitting chip isn't produced by the cells, it's produced by
humans. Take the humans away and the whole process comes to a grinding halt.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype)

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jaequery
So build a lipid membrane, insert some DNA from a bacteria in there, and it
will just function? Sounds like they missed explaining how the membrane will
extract and execute the instructions from the DNA... which in itself is a huge
question mark.

~~~
aaavl2821
They mentioned they included some cellular machinery involved in transcription
and translation, and were able to show that "cells" produced fluorescent
protein in response to an environmental trigger

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jungletime
Even a single cell is more complicated than anything humans have ever created.
Clickbait title?

~~~
jfk13
I wonder. A quick google suggests that a typical cell might contain 10^14
atoms, and that the number of transistors in a current supercomputer is of a
similar order of magnitude. Is the cell really "more complicated" than the
supercomputer? The nature of the complexity is so different that I'm not sure
the comparison is all that meaningful.

~~~
oldandtired
> Is the cell really "more complicated" than the supercomputer?

Let us ask a different question that may suggest a possible answer.

How many different dynamic manufacturing processes occur inside a
supercomputer as compared to the number of different manufacturing,
transportation and communication processes that control those manufacturing
and transportation processes occurring within any single living biological
cell?

~~~
Retric
Cells have a rather limited set of manufacturing processes.

Mycoplasma mycoides only has 525 genes and we can cut tha down to 473 and end
up with something that self replicates.
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/04...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/04/21/we-
built-the-worlds-simplest-cell-but-dunno-how-it-works/). (I find it amusing
how breathless they talk about the fact their where some unknowns in that list
rather amusing.)

~~~
oldandtired
Let me ask some more questions and see what insights we can obtain from them.

Within each manufacturing process, how many different kinds of steps are there
and how "complicated" is each step (the required processing that is required
to do that step)?

What kind of dynamic manufacturing infrastructures are created and then taken
down within the cell for each of these processes?

~~~
Retric
That’s an ambiguous question. If you want to accurately simulate matter, the
larger the block of matter the more processing power it takes. We think of DNA
as more complex than a crystalline structure becase crystals have more order,
but that’s abstracting away a lot of the details. Which means manufacturing a
super computer is vastly more complex in terms of matter.

In some ways we better understand how super computers are made, but we can
also far more easily replicate cells than a supercomputer. So, again supper
computers are more complex.

In terms of the minimum amount of information to turn raw matter into a simple
cell, again super computers take more information.

I suspect you want some sort of third definion where cells are more complex,
but that’s more begging the question than how things actually are.

~~~
oldandtired
When you get the chance have a listen to some of the discussions about organic
chemical processes occurring in cells by Dr James Tour. From an engineering
and manufacturing point of view, the processes that occur in a cell are far
beyond what we are able to achieve in any of our engineering and manufacturing
processes.

It is not about simulating processes, it is about doing those processes.

~~~
Retric
We can manufacture DNA from 'scratch'. That means as long as we have the
sequence we can largely use those same processes. Sure, we don't necessarily
understand what's going on, but neither did our ancestors you first
manufactured steel etc etc.

Protean folding is very complex to simulate. But, so is even a hydrogen atom
starting from quantum mechanic equations. Saying we can abstract away that
hydrogen atom does not mean the complexity disappears. Further from a QM
standpoint protean folding is really slow, it's a complex dance like plate
tectonics even if it's blindingly fast from our viewpoint.

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rumcajz
> And as the engineers of synthetic life, she and her colleagues can easily
> incorporate controls or a kill switch that renders the cells harmless.

That's a bold claim given how evolution routes around failures.

~~~
HillaryBriss
yeah. that line made me laugh. it's the kind of thing i expect to see in a
low-grade sci-fi horror screenplay.

Mary: "But to make all these pseudo-cells reproduce at room temperature, we
had to mimic properties of the polio, smallpox, and ebola viruses, professor!
What if it gets out of control?!"

Professor Devin Daylooded: "Don't worry, Mary Goodsave. You may be a super-
intelligent grad student who sees things I don't, but I will ignore your
cautionary message which even the audience understands because I can easily
incorporate controls or a kill switch that renders the cells harmless."

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henearkr
This work focuses on the membrane, but I'm more concerned about the
feasability to synthesize ribosomes from scratch. Ribosomes are incredibly
complex tiny machines.

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amelius
Reminds me of a simulation of the formation of a lipid bilayer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-
dAvbl330](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-dAvbl330)

(the molecules that suddenly appear/disappear are just moving in/out of the
plane of view; a camera focus/blur effect would have been nicer, I think)

