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European scientists have begun work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.
Starting with non-living chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The €13mn “MiniLife” project, funded by European Research Council and involving biologists and chemists from several universities, it may be the first in the world to reach the minimum standard for an artificial living system.
“The breakthrough will be a major breakthrough in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for Basic Science Information. Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is the principal investigator in the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-held dream of mankind.”
John Sutherland, who works on the chemistry of early life at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing global effort to “create small living systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by a never-ending desire to understand how life came to be on Earth and whether it may have originated elsewhere in the visible universe.”
Some artificial life researchers are working with the building blocks known on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, in contrast, really aims to start from scratch, without using molecules that are products of evolution.
Szathmáry said: “We adapt to known life forms because they are very evolved creatures, and they simplified to get to a small size.”
MiniLife researchers are testing four systems that could, individually, or in combination, develop into the basis of minilife. All are “autocatalytic”, the necessary property of reproducibility in which chemical reactions are carried out by their products.
Another candidate is formose reaction. This process, discovered in the 19th century, converts a very simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex array of sugar molecules. As the reaction is fed with formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets varies according to the composition of sugars within them.
“Some grow faster and break apart 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 evolution of something that's biologically equivalent, like a mix of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical process.”
The system based on formose must be able to show a reliable inheritance – to pass the acquired characteristics from one generation to another – perhaps in conjunction with one of the other systems being tested.
The six-year timeframe is ambitious, said Griffiths, who hopes the project will be able to “show Darwinian evolution”. As a minimum it can include a system that can change between two conditions that benefit from different environments, such as the famous peppered moth with white wings in a clean area and black when it lives in dirty areas with a black surface.
Sijbren Otto, professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said that his main motivation was “the fascination with humanity and the origin of life. Although the molecules we are developing will probably not be the same ones that life began 3.8bn years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be very useful in understanding what happened then.”
Last month an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented dangers” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror life” – artificial bacteria that mirror the structure of natural viruses – could overwhelm the immunity of humans, other animals and plants.
Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said its design was “highly unlikely to work outside of highly controlled lab conditions” and there was no potential risk to the public.
However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for research. “Now is the time to think far ahead of where research can lead,” Otto said.