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European scientists have begun work on a project to create simple life forms from scratch in the laboratory, taking advantage of theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with lifeless chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and show “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The €13 million MiniLife project, which is funded by the European Research Council and involves biologists and chemists from several universities, may be the first in the world to achieve the minimum criteria for a synthetic life system.
“Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator for the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of mankind.”
John Sutherland, who works on early life chemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing effort around the world to “create minimal living systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This has been driven by the ever-present desire to understand how life arose on Earth and whether it might have originated elsewhere in the observable universe.”
Other artificial life researchers are working with the known building blocks of life on Earth, specifically the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, in contrast, really 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 in order to arrive at a minimalist formulation.”
MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that could be developed, individually or in combination, on a minimum-life basis. All are “autocatalytic,” a property essential to self-replication in which a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own products.
One candidate is the formed reaction. The process, discovered in the 19th century, converts an extremely simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex series of sugar molecules. As the reaction is fed with formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets changes with the composition of sugars within them.
“Some grow faster and divide faster than others,” said Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife investigator at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. “We end up showing something equivalent to fitness in biology, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical system.”
The formose-based system should be able to exhibit reliable heritability—passing on acquired characteristics from one generation to the next—perhaps relative to one of the other systems being evaluated.
The six-year timeframe is ambitious, said Griffiths, who is optimistic the project will be able to “demonstrate rudimentary Darwinian evolution.” At a minimum, this would involve a system that can switch between two heritable states in different environments, analogous to the famous peppered moth, whose wings are white in clean environments and black when living in dirty 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 the nature and origin of life. Although the molecules we develop will probably not be the ones from which life began on prebiotic Earth 3.8 billion years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be very important to understanding what happened next.
Last month an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented dangers” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror life” – manufactured bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes – can overwhelm the defenses of humans, animals and other plants.
Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said his creations were “extremely unlikely to have any viability outside of highly controlled laboratory conditions” and posed no potential 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 much further ahead about where research is likely to lead,” Otto said.
