For this, it has been proposed to model life in a computer, to program the complete replication cycle of a protocell.
Many believed that such an objective was too far a bridge, that the theoretical difficulties they would face would be almost insurmountable. It was not so. The culmination was the project where 13 European groups worked: PACE, Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution. The project, concluded today, has made it possible to prove that the project is viable, that it can be passed from silicon in computers to Petri dishes in laboratories. And there it is working.
Scientists do not start from an existing genome, but from inanimate matter, using chemical systems that do not have to be biological . In essence, it consists of building a completely new form of life, something like an alien: the research is not aimed at duplicating the type of life that exists on our planet but at deducing what are the rules that every living system must follow and, with them, design a completely different being.
Many of the scientists who are in this company share the vision of one of the great figures of this career, Steen Rassmusen, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, when he said categorically: “We want to know what the hell life is building it “.
What will these artificial cells look like? The best way to imagine them is as tiny nanorobots that work on a molecular scale. We are facing a hybrid, a mixture of biotechnology with nanoelectronics. This future cell will have three microscopic biochemical systems: a container, which will perform the functions of a cell membrane, a construction and maintenance system (metabolism) and a genetic system, which stores and manages information (DNA). The complicated thing is not to design these three components, but rather that they work together. This is the challenge and many optimistic scientists think that this may happen in the next few years.
