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European scientists have begun work on a project to create simple life forms from scratch in the laboratory, leveraging theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with inanimate chemicals, the researchers want to create metabolically active cells within six years that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution.”
The 13 million euro “MiniLife” project, which is financed by the European Research Council and involving biologists and chemists from several universities, could be the first in the world to meet the minimum criteria for a synthetic living system.
“Success would be a groundbreaking achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is the lead researcher of the ERC grant. “The de novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”
John Sutherland, who works on early life chemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project was 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 an ongoing desire to understand how life arose on Earth and whether it may have arose 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. In contrast, the ERC project 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 developed creatures,” said Szathmáry, “and simplify to arrive at a minimalist formulation.”
MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that could be developed individually or in combination to form a basis for minimal life. All are “autocatalytic,” a property essential to self-replication, in which a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own products.
This is a candidate Formose reaction. Discovered in the 19th century, the process converts an extremely simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex series of sugar molecules. Since formaldehyde is added to the reaction, 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. “What we end up with is something akin to fitness in biology, like a mix of slow- and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical system.”
The Formose-based system must be able to demonstrate reliable heritability – the passing of acquired traits from one generation to the next – possibly in conjunction with one of the other systems being evaluated.
The six-year timetable is ambitious, said Griffiths, who is optimistic the project can “demonstrate rudimentary Darwinian development.” At the very least, it would be a system that can switch between two heritable states in different environments, analogous to the famous pepper moth, 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 the ones from which life began on the prebiotic Earth 3.8 billion years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be important for understanding what happened back then be meaningful.”
Last month, an international group of researchers warned of the “unprecedented risks” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror lives” – engineered bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes – could overwhelm the defenses of humans, other animals and plants.
Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said his creations were “extremely unlikely to be viable outside of very controlled laboratory conditions” and posed no possible risk to the public.
However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research. “Now it’s time to think even further about where the research is likely to lead,” Otto said.
