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European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalising on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with inanimate chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and show “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The €13mn “MiniLife” project, which is funded by the European Research Council and involves biologists and chemists from several universities, could be the first in the world to reach the minimum criteria for a synthetic living system.
“Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”
John Sutherland, who works on the chemistry of early life at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing worldwide effort to “create minimal living systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by the perennial desire to understand how life originated on Earth and whether it could also have originated elsewhere in the observable universe.”
Other artificial life researchers are working with the known building blocks of life on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, in contrast, aims truly to start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.
“We abstract away from known life forms because they are highly evolved creatures,” said Szathmáry, “and simplify so as to arrive at a minimalistic formulation.”
The MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that might, individually, or in combination, be developed into a basis for minimal life…
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