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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 growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with inanimate chemicals, researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The “MiniLife” project, endowed with 13 million euros and financed by European Research Council and involving biologists and chemists from several universities, could be the first in the world to achieve the minimum criteria for a synthetic living system.
“Success would constitute a historic achievement in the field of fundamental sciences,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Institute. Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is principal investigator of the ERC grant. “The de novo creation of living systems is a long-held dream of humanity. »
John Sutherland, who works on early childhood chemistry at the MRC’s Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, said the project is part of a growing global effort to “create minimal living systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by the eternal desire to understand how life arose on Earth and whether it could also have arisen elsewhere in the observable universe. »
Other artificial life researchers work on the known building blocks of life on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, on the other hand, truly aims to start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.
“We abstract from known life forms because they are highly evolved creatures,” Szathmáry said, “and simplify to arrive at a minimalist formulation.”
MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that could, individually or in combination, be developed to provide a basis for minimal lifespan. All are “autocatalytic,” a property essential to self-replication in which a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own products.
A candidate is the formose reaction. The process, discovered in the 19th century, converts an extremely simple chemical, formaldehyde, into a series of increasingly diverse and complex sugar molecules. The reaction being supplied with formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets varies depending on the composition of the sugars they contain.
“Some grow 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.”
The Formosan-based system should be able to exhibit reliable heritability – passing on acquired characteristics from one generation to the next – perhaps in conjunction with one of the other systems being evaluated.
The six-year timetable is ambitious, said Griffiths, who is optimistic that the project will be able to “demonstrate rudimentary Darwinian evolution.” At a minimum, this would involve a system capable of switching between two hereditary states in different environments, analogous to the famous peppered butterfly whose wings are white in clean environments and black when living in polluted places with dark surfaces.
Sijbren Otto, professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said his main motivation was “fascination with nature and the origin of life. Although the molecules we develop are unlikely to be those from which life began on prebiotic Earth 3.8 billion years ago, the mechanisms we hope to unveil will be highly relevant to understanding what happened. passed afterwards.
Last month, an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented risks” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror life” – engineered bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes – could overwhelm the defenses of people, other animals and plants.
When asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said his creations were “extremely unlikely to have any viability outside of very controlled laboratory conditions” and posed no possible risk to the public.
However, the team works with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research. “Now is the time to think much further about where the research is likely to go,” Otto said.
