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Scientists have designed a single-celled synthetic organism that divides and multiplies like the real thing. This breakthrough could one day help researchers build tiny computers and tiny drug factories, all from synthesized cells.
Of course, that future is unlikely to come true for many years to come.
“There are so many ways this next century of biology could potentially change our daily lives for the better,” said lead author Elizabeth Strychalski, head of the cell engineering group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For example, Strychalski and his colleagues plan to design living sensors that can take measurements from their surrounding environment, monitor acidity Temperature and oxygen levels nearby.
Related: 11 body parts cultivated in the laboratory
These sensors cells could also be manufactured to produce specific products – namely drugs – and could possibly be placed inside the human body itself. “One view is that when the cell detects a pathological condition, then it can make that treatment therapeutic, and when a pathological condition is longer there, they could stop doing that treatment,” Strychalski said. Other cells could be grown in the lab and used to efficiently produce food and fuel, while still others could be made to perform computational functions at the molecular level, she added.
But again, these are all visions for the future. To get there, scientists must unravel the mysteries of the cell at a fundamental level before they can manipulate it in their synthetic organisms.
In the new study, Strychalski and his colleagues took a step towards this goal and published their results on March 29 in the journal Cell. They started with an existing synthetic cell called JCVI-syn3.0, which was created in 2016 and contains only 473 genes, Scientific American reported. (For comparison, the bacterium Escherichia coli has around 4000 genes, according to one declaration.)
This bare bone cell was made from the bacteria Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted microbe, which scientists stripped of its natural DNA and replaced with their own modified DNA. By creating JCVI-syn3.0, scientists wanted to know which genes are absolutely essential for a cell to survive and function normally, and which are superfluous.
But while JCVI-syn3.0 could build proteins and replicate its DNA without problems, the minimalist cell could not divide into uniform spheres. Instead, it divides at random, producing daughter cells of different shapes and sizes. Strychalski and his team decided to solve this problem by adding again the genes to the stripped cell.
After years of work, scientists have produced JCVI-syn3A, which contains a total of 492 genes. Seven of these genes are essential for normal cell division, they found.
“A certain number of the genes in the minimal cell had no known function, “said co-first author James Pelletier, who at the time of the work was a graduate student at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It turned out that some of the genes that the cell previously needed to divide did not have a known function, ”he said. The reintroduction of these genes allowed the minimal cell to divide into perfectly uniform orbs.
Some of these important genes likely interact with the cell membrane, based on their genetic sequences, Pelletier said. This could mean that they alter the physical properties of the membrane, making it malleable enough to divide properly, or that they generate forces inside the membrane that encourage scission, he said. But at this time, the team doesn’t know what specific mechanisms the genes use to help cells divide, he noted.
“Our study was not designed to understand the mechanisms inside the cell associated with each of these genes of unknown function,” Strychalski said. “This will have to be a future study.”
As researchers continue to unravel the mysteries of the minimal cell, other synthetic biologists are working with even more simplistic systems. Synthetic biology exists on a spectrum, from “a soup of inanimate chemicals to the glory of a mammalian cell or a bacterial cell,” Strychalski said. The future of the field could lead us to innovative marvels like cell-sized computers, but for now the work is largely driven by a curiosity about how the building blocks of life come together. and what that can tell us about ourselves, she told me.
“How do we understand the most basic unit of life, the cell?… There is something very compelling about it,” Strychalski said. “Later we can imagine how much we can do with … this minimal platform.”
Originally posted on Live Science.
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