Building Synthetic Cells From Scratch

Posted: 1/5/2019

Trigger

Just read this long, fascinating, and in depth article How biologists are creating life-like cells from scratch Built from the bottom up, synthetic cells and other creations are starting to come together and could soon test the boundaries of life. published by Nature Journal on 11/7/2018

To build synthetic cells from the bottom up has been one of the hot frontiers in science for about the past two decades!

European Advances

Surprise, surprise European scientists appear to be at the cutting edge in this field. “In September [of 2018], the US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced its first programme on synthetic cells, funded to the tune of $10 million.” What a late comer to the game! Whereas “... several European investigators ... have proposed building a synthetic cell as one of the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship schemes, which receive funding of €1 billion.”

Within A Decade

Some scientists predict that we will have functioning synthetic cells created from molecules or other basic ingredients within a decade. We may even achieve industrial scale by then.

Artificial Mitochondria

Without energy synthetic cells would not work very well. “Joachim Spatz’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, has built a rudimentary mitochondrion that can create ATP inside a vesicle.” In order to do this, they used latest microfluidic technologies.

More Efficient Photosynthesis

According to this article, scientists are already working replicating photosynthesis. Photosynthesis could be an energy source of the future.

“Another Max Planck [Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology] synthetic-biology group ... has been chipping away at other approaches to constructing cellular metabolic pathways. ... pathways that allow photosynthetic microbes to pull carbon dioxide from the environment and make sugars and other cellular building blocks. ...

His group sketched out a system design that could convert CO2 into malate, a key metabolite produced during photosynthesis. ... team searched databases for enzymes that might perform each of the reactions. For a few, they needed to tweak existing enzymes into designer ones.

In the end, they found 17 enzymes from 9 different organisms, including E. coli, an archaeon, the plant Arabidopsis and humans. The reaction, perhaps unsurprisingly, was inefficient and slow7. ... After some further enzyme engineering, … operates 20% more efficiently than photosynthesis. Expanding this work, [team] has begun constructing a crude version of a synthetic chloroplast ...”

As an aside: About four years ago it was shown that quantum mechanics explains the efficiency of photosynthesis (see e.g. here). How will this research of synthetic photosynthesis and quantum effects work out?

Programmable Bioreactors

“... at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is working on ways to build programmable bioreactors, by introducing simple genetic circuits into liposomes and fusing them together to create more-complex bioreactors. ...

builds these bioreactors using a spinning tube system ... which produces smaller liposomes. The researchers add circles of DNA called plasmids that they have designed to perform a particular function, along with all the machinery needed to make proteins from DNA.”

Minimal Genome

The J. Craig Vintner Institute (JCVI) “... took one of the smallest-known microbial genomes on the planet, that of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, and systematically disrupted its genes to identify the essential ones. Once they had that information, they chemically stitched together a minimal genome in the laboratory.

This synthesized genome contained 473 genes — about half of what was in the original organism — and it was transplanted into a related bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum. In 2016, the team showed that this minimal synthetic genome could ‘boot up’ a free-living, although slow-growing organism … As a next step, and supported by an NSF grant of nearly $1 million, ... will attempt to install the JCVI-syn3.0a genome into a synthetic liposome containing the machinery needed to convert DNA into protein, to see whether it can survive. … JCVI has been doing adaptive laboratory evolution experiments with JCVI-syn3.0a, selecting for organisms that grow faster in a nutrient-rich broth. So far, after about 400 divisions, ... have obtained cells that grow about 15% faster than the original organism. ... a handful of gene-sequence changes popping up. But there’s no evidence yet of the microbe developing new cellular functions or increasing its fitness by leaps and bounds.”