Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome (2016)

science.org

59 points·sebg··6 comments

Follow-up study tracking the evolution of this minimal cell: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06288-x

Makes you wonder if there's a possible set of RNA enzymes which could be isolated exist would be able to bootstrap the cytoplasmic environment as well.

The ultimate experiment would obviously be to go from a surfactant micelle in an amino acid soup to a functional cell synthesizing proteins using just genetic code or code precursors.

That experiment probably can't be run end-to-end because evolution took an enormous time to cook up our biochemistry from the primordial soup. I could also be completely wrong, and we learn that simplistic cells can arise on short timescales if there is no competition from existing life.

My thought was that if you just intentionally dumped the working components into the relevant areas, you would get a cell in short order - i.e. there's a combination of RNAzymes which must've existed on the transition from RNA-world to proteins, to DNA coding.

Basically: evolution trial and error'd, but it stands to reason that we could just sit there injecting the next step which worked each time.

A 2022 review on synthetic genomics from the same team is to be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.06.046 .

I remember reviewing this paper with my lab when it was published! Very interesting work

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