Possible to artificially build life?

S

Specialist

Registered Senior Member
After reading this article I was wondering why/if anyone has tried to build a living cell?

We can see down to the subatomic level already so it must be in our reach. one of the smallest bacteria (not proven yet but still...) is only "20 to 150 nm in length". Is that too much atoms to arrange?

Do you think if you could arrange the necessary atoms, if would be alive or just callopse like an old machine? :confused:

nanobe1.jpg


Colony of alleged nanobes on sandstone surface viewed through very powerful electron microscope
 
Well, to be honest, I believe it would be entirely possible chemically. The molecules exist because of how the atoms interact with each other under natural conditions.

*edit* removed stupid comment.

If these nanobes are indeed free living organisms, then that means there must be a different system for translation, since the specs it gives for ribosomes are 50-60nm in diameter -- a little too large to fit inside the 20-30nm diameter of the nanobe. That would certainly be an interesting find.
 
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Not so long ago we didn't even know about the arrangement of microtubules and actin filaments in the protoplasm of our own cells; back in high school they told us that protoplasm was a liquid and the cell constituents just kind of floated in it.

I would think that our understanding of cell structure (or lack thereof) would be the biggest barrier to this kind of cell construction, at least right now.
 
The problem I have is more along the lines of "what can prevent it from being done?"
The production of an organism that doesn' t exist in nature has been achieved many times by genetic engineering, and by more primitive methods such as plant breeding;

if you are trying to design an organism that has no relationship to any that exists naturally, with every protien expressed by a novel route, you are going to have a lot of difficulty;
why bother if you can patch together new organisms from tried and tested gene complexes?
No doubt one day it will be possible to create entirely new living creatures, perhaps adapted to live in space or Mars; but there will be a lot of splicing going on in the interim.
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There working on it right now, I never manage to find the SA article that I had read about this from but here is another link:
http://www.cnn.com/1999/HEALTH/12/10/simplest.cell/

Biorobotics is the engineering of synthetic life, machines made for biological chemistry, the field is rather primitive now because it requires a much greater understand of proteinomics and yet-yo-exist high efficiency DNA synthesizers to make truly synthetic genes, right now all we can do is swap and modify already living genes.
 
Sorry a bit of offtopic

Originally posted by CharonZ
Not so long ago we didn't even know about the arrangement of microtubules and actin filaments in the protoplasm of our own cells; back in high school they told us that protoplasm was a liquid and the cell constituents just kind of floated in it.
Click to expand...

Can somebody provide a link. Im high school and would like to know, how it REALY is. Thank you.
 
It will be done eventually. I will be very interesting when it is finally done. Everyday objects could become living in an attempt to extend and reduce maintence periods in complex and advanced machinery.
 
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