It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery. Their "minimal"

It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery. Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo! This is more like it https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacterial-cell https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter... but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"