Lynn J Rothschild, Nils J H Averesch, Elizabeth A Strychalski, Felix Moser, John I Glass, Rolando Cruz Perez, Ibrahim O Yekinni, Brooke Rothschild-Mancinelli, Garrett A Roberts Kingman, Feilun Wu, Jorik Waeterschoot, Ion A Ioannou, Michael C Jewett, Allen P Liu, Vincent Noireaux, Carlise Sorenson, Katarzyna P Adamala
The de novo construction of a living organism is a compelling vision. Despite the astonishing technologies developed to modify living cells, building a functioning cell "from scratch" has yet to be accomplished. The pursuit of this goal alone has─and will─yield scientific insights affecting fields as diverse as cell biology, biotechnology, medicine, and astrobiology. Multiple approaches have aimed to create biochemical systems manifesting common characteristics of life, such as compartmentalization, metabolism, and replication and the derived features, evolution, responsiveness to stimuli, and directed movement...
March 26, 2024: ACS Synthetic Biology