Synthetic life
Synthetic life is artificial life created from non-living (abiotic) substances. It belongs to the discipline of synthetic biology. It is usually distinguished from mechanical life that usually belongs to the discipline of robotics.
Synthetic biochemical life
Synthetic life is artificial life created in vitro from biochemicals and their component materials as opposed to the normally implied in silico when using the broader term "alife".
W. Wayt Gibbs suggests that synthetic life has three major goals: "One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name--a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms."[1]
Synthetic life experiments attempt to either probe the origins of life, study some of the properties of life, or more ambitiously to recreate life from non-alive (abiotic) substances. An example of synthetic life might be an attempt to create self-replicating, self-perpetuating (autocatalytic) chemical reactions to simulate possible origins for life. Researchers involved feel that the creation of true synthetic biochemical life is relatively close and cheap, and perhaps easier than the effort needed to place man on the Moon.[2]
One way to create a new organism is to just replace the genome in an existing, natural cell. The replacing genome can be a synthetic genome (created by gene synthesis). Whether an organism reusing everything from a natural cell but the genome (such as the creation of Synthia in 2010[3]) should be called "synthetic life" is open to debate.
See also
- Artificial related
- Biology relates
References
- ^ W. Wayte Gibbs (May 2004). "Synthetic Life". Scientific American.
- ^ "NOVA: Artificial life". Retrieved 2007-01-19.
- ^ Gibson DG, Glass JI, Lartigue C; et al. (2010). "Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome". Science. doi:10.1126/science.1190719. PMID 20488990.
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