Interesting blog post, based on an interesting paper. For a bit more background, there's been a couple of posts on the "minimal cell" concept on Derek Lowe's v

Interesting blog post, based on an interesting paper. For a bit more background, there's been a couple of posts on the "minimal cell" concept on Derek Lowe's venerable In the Pipeline blog. This 2016 post [1] talks about the initial development of the JCVI-syn3.0 cell; this 2023 post [2] goes over a paper that studied the evolutionary dynamics of these minimal cells. [1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/smallest-viable-genome-very-weird https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/smallest-viable-ge... [2] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ground https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ground