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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 create metabolically active cells that grow, divide and exhibit “Darwinian evolution” within six years.
The €13mn “MiniLife” project, funded by European Research Council And by involving biologists and chemists from different universities, it could be the first in the world to reach minimum standards for a synthetic life system.
“Success would constitute a breakthrough in basic science,” said Yers Sathmari, director of the Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on an ERC grant. “The de novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”
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 minimal life systems”.
Sutherland, who is not involved with the MiniLife project, added: “It is driven by a perennial desire to understand how life arose on Earth and whether it might have arisen 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. In contrast, the ERC project aims to start from scratch, rather than using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.
“We abstract from known life forms because they are highly evolved creatures,” Szathmáry said, “and make it easier to arrive at a concise formulation.”
MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that, individually, or in combination, could be developed as a basis for MiniLife. All are “auto-catalytic”, a property essential to self-replication where a chemical reaction is catalyzed by its own product.
A candidate is Constructive feedback. The process, discovered in the 19th century, converts a very simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex series of sugar molecules. As the reaction feeds formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets changes with the composition of sugars inside them.
“Some grow faster and divide more quickly than others,” said Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife investigator at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. “We end up with the emergence of something equivalent to fitness in biology, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical way.”
The Formosa-based system must be able to demonstrate reliable heredity — the transmission of acquired traits from one generation to the next — perhaps in conjunction with one of the other systems being evaluated.
The six-year time frame is ambitious, says Griffiths, who hopes the project will be able to “demonstrate early Darwinian evolution.” At a minimum it would involve a system that can switch between two traditional states in different environments, analogous to the famous peppered moth whose wings are white in clean environments and black when living in polluted areas with dark surfaces.
Sijbren Otto, a professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said his primary motivation was “a fascination with nature and the origins of life. Although the molecules we develop may not have started life on the prebiotic Earth 3.8 billion years ago, we are Hopefully uncovering the mechanisms will be very relevant to understanding what happened then.”
Last month an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented risks” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror life” — engineered bacteria that mirror the structure of natural microbes — could overwhelm the defenses of humans, other animals and plants.
Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said its creations were “very unlikely to have any functionality outside of very controlled lab conditions” and posed 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 where research has the potential to lead,” Otto said.
