Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time that can feed, grow and replicate like a natural cell. This breakthrough in synthetic biology could usher in an era of made-to-order organisms that function like living machines.Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, and her team constructed the cell piece by piece from nonliving chemical components. The creation is a limited and fragile prototype, but it could help scientists better understand the origins of life and could potentially be programmed to help mitigate some of the world’s biggest biological problems. The cell is nonspecific — neither plant nor animal — but most closely resembles a simple bacterium.“I know the full ingredient list of the cell, I know exactly what chemicals, what molecules at what concentrations,” she said. “It is fully defined, which means we can engineer it.”AdvertisementAdvertisementScientists have for decades bioengineered natural cells to solve human problems. A famous example is how human insulin genes can be inserted into E. coli bacterial cells to manufacture insulin and treat diabetes. Scientists argue synthetic cells are the next frontier; they could potentially lead to the development of new cancer treatments and novel ways to capture carbon or manufacture chemicals.Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life, but they are far from simple. The human body has 37 trillion cells, more than the number of stars in the sky, and scientists still don’t know how every different cell type works or what exactly they contain.The synthetic cell that Adamala and her colleagues built was not “life created in the lab” but a “genuine milestone on the road to toward that question,” said Yuval Elani, an associate professor in biochemical technologies at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the work.“Building a cell from scratch means you are no longer tied to the constraints and evolutionary baggage of natural biology. It opens up the possibility of designing systems and programming them to do things that living cells may not do easily, or may not do at all,” Elani said.AdvertisementAdvertiseme …
