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European scientists have begun work on a project to create simple life forms from scratch in the laboratory, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with non-living chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The “MiniLife” project worth 13 million euros, which he finances European Research Council and includes 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 represent a milestone in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for Conceptual Foundations of Science at Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is the principal investigator on an ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of mankind.”
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 global effort to “create minimal living systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by a long-standing desire to understand how life originated on Earth and whether it could have originated elsewhere in the observable universe.”
Other artificial life researchers work with the known building blocks of life on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, in contrast, aims to truly start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.
“We abstract from known life forms because they are highly evolved beings,” Szathmáry said, “and simplify to arrive at a minimalist formulation.”
MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that could, individually or in combination, be developed into the basis of minimal life. All are “autocatalytic,” a property essential to self-replication in which a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own products.
One candidate is formosan reaction. The process, discovered in the 19th century, turns an extremely simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex array of sugar molecules. As the reaction is fed with formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets varies depending on the sugar composition in them.
“Some grow faster and divide faster than others,” said Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife researcher at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. “We end up with the emergence of something equivalent to fitness in biology, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical system.”
A formosan-based system must be able to demonstrate reliable heritability – passing on acquired characteristics from one generation to the next – perhaps in combination with some of the other systems being evaluated.
The six-year deadline is ambitious, said Griffiths, who is optimistic that the project will be able to “demonstrate rudimentary Darwinian evolution.” At a minimum, this would include a system that can switch between two hereditary states in different environments, analogous to the famous pepper moth whose wings are white in clean environments and black when it lives in polluted places with dark surfaces.
Sijbren Otto, a professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said his primary motivation was “a fascination with nature and the origin of life. Although the molecules we develop are unlikely to be the ones that started life on prebiotic Earth 3.8 billion years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be highly relevant to understanding what happened then.”
Last month, an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented risks” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said that “mirror life” – manufactured bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes – could overcome the defenses of humans, other animals and plants.
Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said that it is “extremely unlikely that his creations will have any viability outside of highly controlled laboratory conditions” and that they pose no possible risk to the public.
However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research. “Now is the time to think a lot ahead about where research is likely to lead,” Otto said.
