I like these bottom up approaches, as they demonstrate very well how much we _don't_ know yet about life. Important to mention here Craig Venters minimal cell project syn3.0, where the team synthetically created a livable cell comprising 473 genes. It was done to a large part with trial and error, the function of many of those genes is still not known. A recent review from the same team is to be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.06.046 .