8 ms·

How Biologists Are Creating Life-Like Cells from Scratch

116 points by gotocake 8y ago

olliej 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
jungletime 8y ago
Even a single cell is more complicated than anything humans have ever created. Clickbait title?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  How are you drawing the comparison? How many complexity-units would you rate, say, the economy of Morocco?
  - collyw 8y ago
    Was Morocco "created". I would think its fairer to say that it "evolved". Though its an interesting question.
  - laythea 8y ago
    As humans, we don't design economies. Instead we generally try to steer them and fail. Ref: Governments printing money and no gold standard. To give their life worth, some arrogant economists/finance people think they do have control. But they don't.
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      > no gold standard What make you think that a gold standard would be intrinsic to the value of money? Nowadays the value of money is represented by peoples debt, i.e. work that will be done in the future. Printing money just lets the government increase inflation. It doesn't destroy value, it just "steals" from the people, espacially those with much savings.
      - laythea 8y ago
        That's the point though. Without something actually tangibly valuable (IE gold), backing every paper dollar, there is no real value to the dollar anymore. There is value, but its constructed value. And we all know what goes up must come down. Don't forget, the dollar in your pocket is just a piece of paper. EDIT: Yes, it is all a con job. One day we will realise.
        allemagne 8y ago
        You are begging the question of gold (or anything, really) being "tangibly valuable" versus having "constructed value."
        laythea 8y ago
        For something to have true value, it must be limited in supply and also people must have a common agreement that it is valuable. Money used to be like this before the Gold Standard was removed. When that happened, money lost its true value. Off course, money people could get creative then. Now the whole system relies on the population simply "believing" that fictional and unlimited entities (dollars) are valuable. Side Note: The reason why humanity has chosen gold to obsess over as an ultimate form of money, is not relevant to the fact that it has been, is, and always will be. See: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-china-and-russia-are-buying-so-much-gold-2016-08-01 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-china-and-russia-are-b..., for one of numerous reports of governments buying up as much gold as they can.
- jfk13 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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 8y ago
      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/2016/04/21/we-built-the-worlds-simplest-cell-but-dunno-how-it-works/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/04.... (I find it amusing how breathless they talk about the fact their where some unknowns in that list rather amusing.)
      - oldandtired 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        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.
henearkr 8y ago
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.
inciampati 8y ago
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 8y ago
  If they don't replicate, they aren't alive. Replication is the defining characteristic of life.
  - undersuit 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > 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
mothsonasloth 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Seems like synthetic biology is a field you should look into! It's very exciting!
  - mothsonasloth 8y ago
    Ill need to look into it. My background is in Biomed but I joined the dark side and became a computer scientist instead.
    - hexscrews 8y ago
      You may also be interested in the field of biological computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing#Biochemical_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing#Biochemic...). Since your background covers both biology and computer science. Plus the field is new enough that you could be a part of some exciting research.
    - epmaybe 8y ago
      I wouldn't call it the dark side, I think there can always be an overlap in one's skillset.
      - dnautics 8y ago
        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!
rumcajz 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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."
- picsao 8y ago
  Granted the cells are currently producing oxygen but they are only so few - what's the worst that could happen?
amelius 8y ago
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)
jaequery 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
- nine_k 8y ago
  "Bacteria have no cytophysiology, only chemistry", as someone said. But of course you'll need some transcription enzymes to make RNA and then proteins, and plenty of raw amino acids floating around.
picsao 8y ago
Now build a Spirodela that can fly and release it into venus sky. Dead worlds are go for synth bio experiments.

116 points by gotocake 8y ago

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 8y ago
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

jungletime 8y ago

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

thaumasiotes 8y ago
How are you drawing the comparison? How many complexity-units would you rate, say, the economy of Morocco?
- collyw 8y ago
  Was Morocco "created". I would think its fairer to say that it "evolved". Though its an interesting question.
- laythea 8y ago
  As humans, we don't design economies. Instead we generally try to steer them and fail. Ref: Governments printing money and no gold standard. To give their life worth, some arrogant economists/finance people think they do have control. But they don't.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    > no gold standard What make you think that a gold standard would be intrinsic to the value of money? Nowadays the value of money is represented by peoples debt, i.e. work that will be done in the future. Printing money just lets the government increase inflation. It doesn't destroy value, it just "steals" from the people, espacially those with much savings.
    - laythea 8y ago
      That's the point though. Without something actually tangibly valuable (IE gold), backing every paper dollar, there is no real value to the dollar anymore. There is value, but its constructed value. And we all know what goes up must come down. Don't forget, the dollar in your pocket is just a piece of paper. EDIT: Yes, it is all a con job. One day we will realise.
      - allemagne 8y ago
        You are begging the question of gold (or anything, really) being "tangibly valuable" versus having "constructed value."
        laythea 8y ago
        For something to have true value, it must be limited in supply and also people must have a common agreement that it is valuable. Money used to be like this before the Gold Standard was removed. When that happened, money lost its true value. Off course, money people could get creative then. Now the whole system relies on the population simply "believing" that fictional and unlimited entities (dollars) are valuable. Side Note: The reason why humanity has chosen gold to obsess over as an ultimate form of money, is not relevant to the fact that it has been, is, and always will be. See: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-china-and-russia-are-buying-so-much-gold-2016-08-01 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-china-and-russia-are-b..., for one of numerous reports of governments buying up as much gold as they can.
jfk13 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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/2016/04/21/we-built-the-worlds-simplest-cell-but-dunno-how-it-works/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/04.... (I find it amusing how breathless they talk about the fact their where some unknowns in that list rather amusing.)
    - oldandtired 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.

henearkr 8y ago

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.

inciampati 8y ago

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 8y ago
If they don't replicate, they aren't alive. Replication is the defining characteristic of life.
- undersuit 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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

mothsonasloth 8y ago

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 8y ago
Seems like synthetic biology is a field you should look into! It's very exciting!
- mothsonasloth 8y ago
  Ill need to look into it. My background is in Biomed but I joined the dark side and became a computer scientist instead.
  - hexscrews 8y ago
    You may also be interested in the field of biological computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing#Biochemical_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing#Biochemic...). Since your background covers both biology and computer science. Plus the field is new enough that you could be a part of some exciting research.
  - epmaybe 8y ago
    I wouldn't call it the dark side, I think there can always be an overlap in one's skillset.
    - dnautics 8y ago
      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!

rumcajz 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
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."
picsao 8y ago
Granted the cells are currently producing oxygen but they are only so few - what's the worst that could happen?

amelius 8y ago

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)

jaequery 8y ago

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 8y ago
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
nine_k 8y ago
"Bacteria have no cytophysiology, only chemistry", as someone said. But of course you'll need some transcription enzymes to make RNA and then proteins, and plenty of raw amino acids floating around.

picsao 8y ago

Now build a Spirodela that can fly and release it into venus sky. Dead worlds are go for synth bio experiments.