Scientists Made a Cell From Scratch For First Time (cnn.com) 59
AleRunner writes: The first fully synthetic cell ("SpudCell") has been created in the Department of Genetics at the University of Minnesota. Strictly speaking, it's described as a "cell-like system constructed entirely from known chemical components that can perform a complete cell cycle." It is able to replicate, but only for approximately five generations.
The key advance is that the cell is "built entirely bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components," although it still contains material from E. coli bacteria. "PURE is a defined mixture of 36 purified enzymes from E. coli bacteria," including ribosomes, that provides the infrastructure for genetic replication.
CNN has an article on the advance, including interview material with Professor Kate Adamala, who led the research. "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." "Humans did not create life," notes an anonymous Slashdot reader. "Researchers call it a constructed cell, not 'life created in the lab' but a 'genuine milestone on the road toward that question.' It lacks full autonomy (needs feeding, no independent evolution)."
Special thanks to Slashdot readers kemosabi and AleRunner for submitting the story and additional sources, including reports from The New York Times and The Guardian, as well as information from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
The key advance is that the cell is "built entirely bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components," although it still contains material from E. coli bacteria. "PURE is a defined mixture of 36 purified enzymes from E. coli bacteria," including ribosomes, that provides the infrastructure for genetic replication.
CNN has an article on the advance, including interview material with Professor Kate Adamala, who led the research. "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." "Humans did not create life," notes an anonymous Slashdot reader. "Researchers call it a constructed cell, not 'life created in the lab' but a 'genuine milestone on the road toward that question.' It lacks full autonomy (needs feeding, no independent evolution)."
Special thanks to Slashdot readers kemosabi and AleRunner for submitting the story and additional sources, including reports from The New York Times and The Guardian, as well as information from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What kind of baloney pansy shit is the phrase "Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should" ?? There are many useful things that can be done with it .. everything from studying how cells work to a platform for protein production. Just because you lack the IQ to see the value in something doesn't mean it has no value. We need science to advance. We need the attitude: "every experiment you can do is worth doing" (unless you know it will fuck shit up) .. forget the "just because you can doesn't mean you shou
Re:This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't get the feeling that the GP post was claiming it was valueless. I got the feeling that the concern was it would get out of the control of its creators, manage to mutate or evolve past a death in five generations, and become a threat to everything we know and love.
Re: (Score:1)
Just like any other virus or bacteria or fungi.
As long as they do not release something that is completely different, like replacing carbon by silicon or changing winding direction of DNA etc. out immune system will handle it. Well, Ebola shows you the limits.
Re: (Score:2)
There are tons and tons of pathogens with high mortality rates without medical intervention. There are tons of pathogens that only see minimal death rates without active medical intervention because vaccination reduced the penetration that those pathogens have into the community and may have even forced evolution for increased transmissibility in lieu of virulence in order to spread at all.
Re: (Score:2)
The immune system is tuned to treat anything different as enemy. Viruses are successful when they closely mimic a legit biological process .. meaning if there is something wildly different the immune system can lock onto it easier not harder.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Life is hard. If you escape from the lab, you are against thousands of viruses, bacteria and fungi that try to eat you. I find it quite unlikely that you would just accidentally create a super cell from scratch that beats millions of years of evolution.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because you can make bubonic plague even more contagious doesn't mean you should.
Re: This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:3)
Amusing you insulting the OP about lack of IQ when you dont even recognise that well known quote.
Re: This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:2)
Progress is a wonderful thing, but let us not be lackadaisical about inherent risks.
Here comes DHS... (Score:2)
Quick, dump it into the ocean!
Re: This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score:2)
Hollywood reflects reality? Great! So where's my goddamn warp drive and flux capacitor?
And my Cherry 2000 robot wife? Actually we might be real close to that one.
Self-healing materials (Score:2)
Research still valuable for applications on self-healing materials: for concrete, for sealing/gaskets, and so on.
Re: Self-healing materials (Score:4, Informative)
"sealing/gaskets"
Worked the other way in The Andromeda Strain.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
If I put some bricks or concrete blocks in a vacant lot and they assembled themselves into a house you'd think that was pretty cool.
Obligatory religious joke (Score:3, Funny)
After discovering how to clone humans, two scientists challenged God:
"We don't need you anymore," they said. "We can make life by ourselves now."
"Okay," God replied, "let's have a man-making contest."
"All right," said the scientists. "We'll do it like you did in the beginning." Then they reached down to grab a handful of dirt to begin to form a man.
Then they heard God's voice from heaven: "Hold it - get your own dirt!"
--
Credit: Not sure who created this joke, but I 8th-commandmented it from here [christianitytoday.com].
Re: Obligatory religious joke (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Paywalled!!l
Sorry, didn't see the paywall, script blocker blocked it.
Search for the phrase "Then they reached down to grab a handful of dirt to begin to form a man" and you will find many sites with this joke. At least one of them should be without a paywall.
Re: (Score:3)
What kind of Engineer would God be? A mechanical, an electrical, a chemical and a civil engineer fell into an argument what kind of engineer God would be. Using Man, the crown of God's creation as an example each of the engineers argued his case. The mechanical engineer explained: " Look at the skeleton, the joints, the spine and the delicate balance it is capable of. God must be a mechanical engineer". "Wait a second" replied the electrical engineer. " Look at the nervous system, the eyes and the brain, th
Going to mess up the apologists (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sadly he's right, and you can see the beginnings of it in these very comments.
Folks who reduce everything to a dichotomous battle aren't going to see nuance here, they're going to see "scientists think they are better than god". The fact no scientists needed to consult with or even think about an authority on their god anywhere through this process just makes it worse.
It might be a ridiculous claim that shows their hand, but they're already in denial about the relevance of their religion too.
Re: (Score:2)
"Thou shalt not take lipids, food stuffs, enzymes, or ribosomes from the creations thy God hath made. For in that day the angel that hath sayeth on the...
Sometimes called the 11th commandment. It's not widely reported because nobody knew what it meant. Now we do.
Re: (Score:1)
It's funny how it's always "new science challenging religion". Quite frankly, science is not very high on the list of reasons to not believe in religion. People that still believe in religion won't be swayed by some scientific discovery.
I can't list all the reasons, not enough time and space, but maybe the highest is that we know how the different religions evolved, we know they are man made.
My favorite may be the whole apple thing. So the guy put what are essentially kids in a garden, tell them not to push
"From scratch" (Score:5, Informative)
Re: "From scratch" (Score:2)
This is what I came to say. Starting with elements is as close to scratch as we get, and they didn't go there
Re: (Score:1)
Yes. Came here to say that. And not the first time either.
Ask your favorite LLM: "how many times have scientists claimed to have make a cell from scratch?" ;)
Re: (Score:3)
...except for all of the 36 enzymes we borrowed from another living cell,
And ribosomes.
So, they took apart living e-coli cells, purified the pieces, and put the pieces together. To make something not as good as what they started with.
(the summary seemed to imply that ribosomes are enzymes. They're not.)
Re: (Score:2)
The innovation seems to be having built a long chain of DNA from scratch that won't self-destruct instantly when put into a lipid envelope.
Re: (Score:3)
Ribosomes do a job a bit more complicated than "catalyze reactions."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a kid that can make digital clocks like that.
Oh great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Now AI, via robotics, will eventually be able to construct its own meat puppets with AI-directed brain development. Soon there will be no further need for the messy process of giving birth and raising kids to adulthood - just grow adults in a vat, program them, and put them to work.
I'm sure that Thiel, Karp, Musk, and the like are jacking themselves off while contemplating this news.
Re: (Score:2)
Are we doing that great with the process ourselves?
Our children are deeply despondent, increasingly suicidal, and from the latest surveys evolution seems to have decided higher thinking abilities are to some degree a waste of energy better used for other things.
Re: (Score:2)
Good points. My only caution would be against conflating the evolution of some Western societies with the evolution of Homo Sapiens in general.
Re: (Score:2)
Plunk Kurzweil in that group as well. That yokel thinks that eventually some organization is going to clone his DNA and recreate him:
Ray: Ta-Da!!! I'm back.
Prole: Who the Hell are you?
Ray: I'm the one who predicted the Singularity. It has finally arrived, and I'm back baby!!
Prole: Okay, here's a shovel, get to work.
Ray: Wha? Do you know who I am?
Prole: No, and I don't give a flying rat's ass. Now get to work or you don't eat. Gotit!!
Ray: But, but, but....I'm a genius, you owe me!
Prole: I owe you nothing, an
Ribosomes are awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Starting with a ribosome seems a bit like cheating -- they're extremely complex, probably Turing-complete biocomputers.
If there's proof of a supreme being, or aliens seeding life here (is there a difference), it's the ribosome.
Re:Ribosomes are awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
People seem to think that the first living organism to evolve has to be as complex as the simplest cells we know, but more likely it was much simpler. We just don't have any living examples because such protocells probably can't compete with modern ones. The first life-forms can be slow, inefficient, inaccurate at reproducing, etc. because they had zero competition. Somebody joked "union workers evolved first!"
One interesting theory is that the first living thing(s) were actually a set of complimentary proto-cells where reproduction happened in cycled stages say: A to B to C back to A, because self-replicating is hard to get right in a single step. Each stage may have fed off different chemicals. Eventually they evolved into a single unit.
Re: (Score:2)
Francis Crick calculated how long it would take for life to evolve from scratch, and concluded it would take longer than the earth has existed. In response, he developed the hypothesis of panspermia, that life evolved elsewhere and somehow landed here (maybe just a few cells on an astroid). I don't have t
Re: (Score:1)
Any such calculation is likely to be off either direction by a factor of about 10 such that the age of the Earth and age of the universe is not different enough to distinguish. And we don't know all the pathways to biogenesis such that estimating the early stages is a fuzzy art.
Panspermia is certainly a realistic
Re: (Score:2)
One could also say this is basically nano-tech, not life.
They just need to perfect it (Score:2)
You know, creating a perfect cell
Re: (Score:3)
You know, creating a perfect cell
Oh, crap - and didn't Google release Android 17 recently?
Re: (Score:2)
And 18 is next
Does it have DNA? (Score:2)
Pedant here.. the article mentions ribsomes , google tells me they are interpreters of DNA as a blueprint, the article doesn't mention DNA. Aside from the chemicals was there no "starter" biological component?
If it doesn't haven't DNA, is that really a cell then ?
Dont want to take away from the remarkable of this invention, feels like we created life from chemistry, but always believed DNA was part of that.
Re:Does it have DNA? (Score:4, Informative)
The paper mentions "90kbp genome" (90,000 DNA base pairs) and "DNA polymerase for genome replication".
For pedantry: DNA isn't strictly needed. Life is defined by ability to feed on an environment, grow, and self-replicate, independently on the biomolecular mechanism to implement it. We happen to only have live examples based on DNA, so that's what they used so can copy existing DNA code. We assume that early cells were based on self-replicating RNA enzymes rather than DNA+transcription. In principle nothing prevents to base life on nucleic acid analogues, forming biopolymers other than RNA/DNA, as long as the resulting biopolymer can encode its own self-replicating mechanism.
Re: (Score:3)
it does sort of simulate rudimentary dna at the structural level, but it's not functional. they made a cell "diorama", the artificial recreation of the mechanical aspect of cells (particularly division). it's a nice engineering stunt likely with technical value and other applications but it has little to do with actual cellular life, let alone replicating it.
luckilly this can't ever kill us... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Dr. Adamala was on the Mindscape podcast (Score:2)
It was a few years ago, but it was fascinating.
https://www.preposterousuniver... [preposterousuniverse.com]
From Scratch (Score:2)
They got all the parts from E. coli bacteria. Convince me that they didn't just make artificial poop.