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Scientists create simple synthetic cell
- Freestyler_3 6y agoCould they make cells that can regulate, if there is abundance of X = do something? I mean that would end a lot of problems. Starting with diabetes.
- mschuster91 6y agoFor that to end diabetes, you'd need to keep the cells in the body... which has two difficulties: first, the cells need to be protected from the immune system destroying them and second, the cells need to find a place in the body to live... and then you have to find a way to keep their numbers regulated.
- fiftyfifty 6y agoSo can we say science has finally achieved a biological “Hello World”?
- tgv 6y agoMore like a quine, isn't it? Pretty impressive.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoNot exactly. These lines of cells weren't created from scratch. From the article: > Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome. They called it JCVI-syn1.0.
- maverick74 6y agoExactly what i was writing!!! :) Now, i guess that - like last time - we're going to have news everywhere claiming that scientists "created life" (again). LOL
- booleandilemma 6y agoThose gaps keep getting smaller and smaller though, don't they?
- thereisnospork 6y agoI'm curious if they are going to 'ship of Theseus' it. First replace the dna, done, then the lipid membrane, then feed it C13 labelled amino acids to prove that the entirety of the cell proteom is from their synthetic genes. Not quite creating life but definitely hijacking it.
- dnautics 6y agoNot specifically with C13, but that is what is going on.
- dnautics 6y ago"Hello World" isn't exactly created from scratch either. You're using libc in most cases.
- tambourine_man 6y agoSomeone wrote it though. It’s not a blackbox that’s evolved independently for millions of years. We as a species know how to build one, since we did.
- blakesley 6y agoI suppose this makes sense, but at a personal level, the two scenarios seem similar. Interpreters & compilers are blackbox to me, at least. I have no idea how they work, and I wouldn't be able to make one for myself. But sure, someone could teach me.
- maverick74 6y agoNo, because like in JCVI-syn1.0 "They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome." In another words, like in the previous attempt (in which i was equally amazed - at first - only to then became disappointed latter) THEY DID NOT CREATE LIFE!!! They picked up an already living organism and "reprogrammed it". Its like having a computer. They are learning to program, and remove all the unnecessary parts but they still don't have a clue on to build the hardware. The problem, it seems, is in transforming bare lifeless quimicals into something "alive". Creating life, it seems, is still something reserved only to God Himself! (and i suspect it's going to be like that for a loooong time, if we ever manage to accomplish it anyway)
- camjohnson26 6y agoIntelligent Design as a theory for life’s origins has received a lot of unfair criticism because people think it’s code for “young earth creationism”. It’s not though, it’s an observation that random natural processes are too slow at generating information to be responsible for life on earth. It’s the same deductive logic you would use if you found an artifact in the middle of the desert. Yes natural forces could have carved an image from the rock, but the more detailed the image the less likely it arose naturally. The fact that even now, no one has any idea of how to create the basic forms of life shows the astonishing amount of information that exists in even a simple cell. It’s time to reconsider intelligent design, even if the designer is an alien species or a programmer of a simulation. There’s too much information to spontaneously generate, and we have never seen life come from non life. The theory has been essentially banished from academia for political, not scientific, reasons, but Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer’s books, specifically Darwin’s Doubt and Signature of the Cell, lay out the case in detail.
- selimthegrim 6y agoIt’s been banished from non religious parts of academia because it’s not falsifiable or testable, so it belongs in the theology department.
- lupire 6y agoWhat would that mean?
- yread 6y agoMore like proof of concept of a buffer overflow vulnerability. It's smart but we have no idea what do all these transistors do
- swiley 6y agoPerhaps "Hello world copy and pasted from StackOverflow."
- kazinator 6y agoYes ... using a copy and paste of seven existing functions, knowing what two of them do. Oh, and bootstrapped using a copy of an existing execution environment.
- mrguyorama 6y agoSo basically the React tutorial app?
- therein 6y agoOnly if we are shipping the cell with a 120MB node_modules directory.
- svachalek 6y agoIt's a 480 line (gene) Hello World. For this to be the minimum viable cell, when we don't even know what so many of the genes do, would be surprising to me. It would mean pre-cellular life somehow gathered these genes or equivalents without the benefits a cell provides. Not saying it's impossible, but it would be pretty interesting.
- f6v 6y ago> Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do. This gives you an appreciation of how little we know. I work in bioinformatics, and every one in the field will tell you that there's been an explosion in the number of datasets. However, try finding recent data on your condition of interest! The number of experiments grows incredibly fast, but we're not there yet to build a comprehensive model even of a simple organism.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- koeng 6y agohttps://vizbi.org/Posters/Images/2021/vB26.png https://vizbi.org/Posters/Images/2021/vB26.png They're working towards it :)
- choeger 6y agoI wonder if this is going to be incredibly useful or totally over the top for research. Imagine a development like the BioNTech vaccine. With an atomic-resolution cell simulator, you could verify your mRNA code, including the delivery into the cell itself and watch it perform. But would that be like watching my CPU decode and fetch instructions, interesting but completely useless for most practical applications, or like a debugger introspecting a running process, an incredible useful tool?
- akiselev 6y ago> But would that be like watching my CPU decode and fetch instructions, interesting but completely useless for most practical applications, or like a debugger introspecting a running process, an incredible useful tool? It would be like watching the cloud of electrons moving over transistors across an entire chip, without the benefit of knowing quantum mechanics. Except in this analogy, everyone is in the same boat and working on a single codebase that's the surviving vestige of billions of years of "just good enough" coders fighting it out, so every little bit helps.
- sliken 6y agoSo grey goo version 0.01?
- stcredzero 6y agoWe are grey goo version 0.0.1!!! That is, life on Earth. Life has already become a solar powered self replicator that caused a global catastrophe, burying the whole Earth in a toxic gas.
- mrguyorama 6y agoI always get angry about the conservative idea that "It's hubris to think humanity is so powerful that we could possibly change the whole environment!" (occasionally sprinkled with "only god is that powerful") Guess what? Such simple creatures as an early bacteria did it even harder over 2 billion years ago, making the earth nearly inhabitable by anything that came before it.
- stcredzero 6y agoNot all conservatives. There are some who actually advocate for a carbon tax. Also, lots of religious people are socialist as all git-out, and some organizations advocate those political positions officially. It's easy to hate on the stupid, uninformed conservatives. Just like it's easy to hate on the stupid, uninformed leftists.
- stevenpetryk 6y agoWorth pointing out that the parent comment said conservative "idea", not conservative people.
- lgats 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
- relax88 6y agoEh, this biological grey goo is likely so crappy at surviving that it would get snuffed out or out competed by any random culture from the bottom of your shoe. I'd be more concerned about viral gain of function research and the weaponization of synthetic biology in general.
- koeng 6y agoJCVI-Syn3A has been around for a while. Here is the genome sequence from 2018 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1241355755 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1241355755 Back at FreeGenes we synthesized all of the genes from this organism with codon optimization for Escherichia coli (https://stanford.freegenes.org/collections/gene-sets/products/jcvi_syn3-0#description https://stanford.freegenes.org/collections/gene-sets/product...), the workhorse of synthetic biology. If you combine the right transcriptional and translational elements, you should be able to build a fully modular genome from this gene set! We also did a couple other organisms in pursuit of this modular genome. As a nice bonus, you can also easily do in-vitro cell-free experiments since the codon tables are nice (and I've heard from Kate Adamala's group that JCVI-Syn3 has pretty bad cell free, though that was a couple years ago) It's important to note that JCVI-Syn3A has a LOT of problems when it comes to its practical use. There just isn't enough energy being put into making an understandable and practical modular/minimal genome.
- mercurywells 6y agoWhat is "pretty bad cell free"?
- koeng 6y agoIf you burst open the cells and extract all the goop inside, you can use that goop to express proteins. For certain organisms, like E.coli, this works quite well, and you can get a significant amount of protein. For others, like JCVI-Syn3, the goop sucks at expressing protein. So it’s a “pretty bad cell free” [expression platform]
- tmabraham 6y agoWhile this top-down approach (removing unnecessary parts of an organism and keeping the essential parts) is really impressive, I personally find the bottom-up approach more interesting: building an "artificial cell" by adding all the transcription and translation machinery into a lipid vesicle, allowing for this "artificial cell" to produce proteins to do various tasks. For example, people have developed "artificial /synthetic cells" that communicate with each other [1] and even bacteria [2]. There has also been some recent study on dividing cell-sized lipid vesicles with membrane proteins [3]. I know there were some comments about science has achieving a biological “Hello World”, and I think this sort of work is what is going to get us there. [1]: https://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v9/n5/abs/nchem.2644.html https://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v9/n5/abs/nchem.2644.ht... [2]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.8b10029 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.8b10029 [3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14696-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14696-0
- sizzle 6y agoCouldn't messing around with these artificial cells expose us to the risk of creating some second order mutations in humans from accidentally introducing these cells to our microbiome from the lab akin to the COVID-19 escaping a 'gain of function' virus lab theory?
- pmiller2 6y agoIt would be extremely unlikely that such an artificial cell could colonize humans in any way, and even more unlikely that such a cell would be pathogenic.
- stadium 6y agoSource?
- pmiller2 6y agoLook at the proportion of natural cells that can colonize humans versus those that can't. Similarly, look at the proportion of pathogenic organisms versus non-pathogenic organisms. Assuming the goal wasn't to produce a pathogen, I find it unlikely we'd produce one accidentally.
- gulli1010 6y agoAre we creating new organisms that can kill us?
- jebeng 6y agoWe already do that ourselves naturally as an organism, as does the environment around us. A simple synthetic cell is so far off from the myriad of potentially deadly cellular organisms(or even deadly malformed protein chains) that already exist and evolve right this instant that it's not worth a second thought in the context of "organisms that can kill us" for now.
- lujim 6y agoAhh boy that title. Clicking on the link to probably realize that this is totally harmless and my initial reaction is due to how much I've been stuck inside for a year.
- dang 6y agoI've truncated the title to try to make it less baity. If anyone wants to suggest a better—i.e. more accurate and neutral—title, preferably using representative language from the article, we can change it again.
- breck 6y agoLoved the full article, thank you for helping science Elsevier! 606,520 Americans died of Cancer last year. With your help restricting access to information, I bet we can hit 1,000,000 by 2030! /s #ElsevierSupportsCancer (100% truth)
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis is an interesting result. Basically cellular biologists debugging cells the same way folks who don't understand how a program works debug it, by chopping parts off until it fails and then adding back bits one by one until it works again :-). At some point, not today and perhaps not in the next 20 years, humans will understand exactly how cells and DNA "work" from first principles to final behavior. At that point, humans will either cease to age and never suffer from disease (Venter would have liked that), or humanity will be wiped out by a malicious organism that is designed by a deranged practitioner. Yet another technology produced Lady or the Tiger challenge.
- darkteflon 6y agoI had to look this up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady,_or_the_Tiger%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady,_or_the_Tiger%3F
- okl 6y agoThere's a fun Smullyan book with that title.
- novaRom 6y agoWe already understand exactly how cells and DNA "work", the problem is methabolic networks are very large and hard to simulate with sufficient certainty.
- dooopy 6y agoLol what are you talking about
- andrewflnr 6y agoThat's rather the point. Those metabolic networks are not meaningfully separable from "how cells and DNA work".
- koheripbal 6y ago...and they also vary across groups of humans. We are not all the same. Each of us is a n=1 genetic experiment.
- Traubenfuchs 6y agoStunning and beautiful: We are on our way to truly intelligently designed life.
- ncmncm 6y ago"Truly intelligently designed life" would need to be designed by somebody truly intelligent. But all we got is us. So, that will always be beyond us.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Giorgi 6y agoSo at some point we can just print humans (or better organism) making organic life obsolete.
- jonplackett 6y agoHow much data is contained in the 500 genes of this cell? I'm kinda curious the minimum number of bytes it takes to make a living cell.
- QuantumG 6y ago543,379 base pairs = 1,086,758 bits = 135,845 bytes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/GCA_001708325.2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/GCA_001708325.2/
- johnwyles 6y agoYou don't need the other half of a base pair in your calculation
- klyrs 6y agoI believe that's two bits per base pair.
- jonplackett 6y agoThanks guys Wow, so life even fits on the very first 8” floppy disk.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Jeud 6y agoInteresting development. We already use cellular machinery to make some drugs like human insulin made with genetically modified bacteria. I think an application for this type of development might be nano construction of advanced materials that are hard to manufacture in quantity, like an engineered bacteria to build sheets of the materials as long as it has a supply of graphite and minimal nutrition.
- rishabhd 6y agoStupid question from someone who has zero idea about this field : What are the chances they unknowingly create a new virus/ bacteria for which no known defenses are present. How is this probability mitigated during design process and what protocols are followed for ensuring this doesn't happen. I did read about bio safety levels, but I feel they themselves could be bypassed.
- restalis 6y agoJust think about the mass of all microscopic organisms outside the labs that suffer mutations all the time. Worrying about innocuous bacteria turning into something bad on accident within comparatively very limited environment of a laboratory doesn't make much sense. Think also of the many free floating bacteria cells in our environment that die due to various factors, whose bodies then have to break apart. Compared to what may happen in a lab, I imagine that those pieces of dead cells floating around freely may pose a greater risk of falling and fitting somehow within living host cells altering their function. (That's one of the mutation vectors, BTW, be it constructive or destructive.) The only scenario that makes sense to seriously worry about when a lab works with/on a virus or bacteria is if the material they started with carries inherently a high risk, or (worse) if they focus on weaponizing it (but that would not be "unknowingly" as you mention).
- restalis 6y agoI imagine that from engineering POV, having self-replicating cells that will also do the useful work won't be optimal. This self-contained single-cell system was the only one that could work in the wild initially, but after a while even in natural systems like our bodies we have cells (like those red ones from our blood) that are produced by specialized tissues (red bone marrow), are designed with a specific function and with a simplified structure (like to be small, without cell nucleus), and disposed by other specific tissues (in the liver). If I had to design a system (and a business) it would involve printing specialized (non-replicating) work cells and some control/disposal mechanisms. The research focus on simplest living and self-replicating cells looks interesting but not that much oriented on any practical purposes.