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In the first part of the series,
I introduced synthetic minimal cells,
which are non-living biochemical reactors that have some,
but not all functions of life cells.
Another type of synthetic cells was also built,
and that one actually is alive.
The Craig Venter Institute synthetic bacteria,
known as JCVI Syn cells.
They're cells derived from a natural,
living bacteria: a mycoplasma.
The bacteria have one of the smallest
possible living genomes.
And that genome was minimized to remove everything
that was not absolutely crucial for survival of the bug.
This smallest cell is still living,
but we don't know the entire list of proteins
and molecules that make that cell.
So while synthetic, the JCVI Syn cells
are not yet fully understood.
On the other hand,
the non-living synthetic minimal cells
are made from a list of very well-defined components.
Those still-dead synthetic cells
are not yet capable of independent life,
but we can understand them like no other biological system,
and we can engineer it as needed.
These are the two fundamentally different approaches
to building synthetic cells:
the top-down approach of taking living cells,
and making them simpler to the point
when we can actually understand the cell,
and the bottom-up approach of taking known,
well-defined, non-living components,
and putting them together into a more complex system
that will eventually become alive.
Neither of those approaches produced
a fully controllable living cell yet.
Top-down synthetic cell is alive,
but not fully understood.
And bottom-up synthetic cell is completely known,
but not yet alive.
And so the goal of synthetic cell engineering
is to have those two approaches meet in the middle.
Make a living, but fully understood cell.
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Some advantages of using synthetic cells
are that it's safer and cheaper to work with that system
than with natural cells.
Because synthetic cells are made
of biochemical components and not alive,
you don't need to treat them
as genetically modified organisms,
so bio-safety rules are much less strict.
Experiments also take much less time,
because you can iterate the design faster,
and those cells are engineered and built
so you don't have to wait for a culture to grow.
And experiments are also cheaper,
which comes from the faster turnaround time
and the less bio-safety constraints.
A lot of biology research
suffers from low reproducibility
and from difficulty distinguishing signal from noise.
And this is mostly because no two natural cells
are ever alike.
Even genetically identical cells will end up being
just a little bit different from each other,
with changes that they accumulate during lifetime.
So when you're measuring any signal from natural cells,
you always get a lot of noise.
But all synthetic cells
that are created together will be identical.
So any measurement done on a synthetic cell
is much more precise.
And that's why when we want to measure
a changing in experiment,
it's easier to identify the signal we're looking at
in a simpler synthetic-cell system.
Another good thing about the fact that synthetic cells
can be made according to a precise recipe
is that if you have a recipe, you can digitize it.
And no complex life cell can be so completely described,
because we don't know the composition
of any other biological system
as well as we know what goes into a synthetic cell.
And digital information can be sent across large distances.
So it's possible to send information about making
a particular synthetic cell to a remote location,
for example, for making drugs on demand or vaccines.
And if you can send something across a large distance,
you can also imagine sending information
to really remote locations,
like a spaceship or a Mars colony,
to make urgently needed drugs or a biological test.
The so-called astro pharmacy is not the only area
of applications of synthetic cells for space exploration.
And with synthetic cells, we can make
simplest possible lifelike models,
and we can study the conditions necessary
for the origin of life,
both on earth and elsewhere in the solar system.
We can also use synthetic cells
to explore how else can life look like,
and figure out conditions that are needed
for life to evolve,
and this would help us finding life on other planets.
The ability to make custom synthetic cells
producing a specific small molecule or protein
can also be used for making drugs.
So right now, to make a biologically-produced drug
like a protein or complex natural product,
life cells are set up in large bioreactors,
most often bacteria or yeast making that drug.
It takes a lot of work to engineer
a strain of life cells producing certain molecules.
And that's mostly because life cells are so complex
that it makes it hard to insert a new metabolic pathway
into that cell,
and then to take the product out
of a natural cell and purify it.
So, drugs are made in those big batches
for large populations of patients.
With synthetic cells being so simple,
and much easier to engineer
for production of specific molecule,
it might become possible to make custom drugs on demand:
in small doses for small populations of patients,
or even for one person.
This makes it possible to imagine
a personalized medicine approach to treating infections,
or cancers, or metabolic syndromes,
or for example, for making personalized vaccines on demand.
Building synthetic life cells
is definitely a bigger job than one country can support.
And in many ways, our work is not unlike
the high-energy particle physics field,
with their need for giant particle accelerators,
or the need for international support of a space station.
Making life from scratch is this giant
research and engineering challenge,
uniting the international community,
and we're organized in a Build-A-Cell initiative.
Build-A-Cell supports a group of researchers,
ethicists, and policymakers,
exploring the ways to build and safely use synthetic cells.
At the backbone of our community is in-person interactions.
We're meeting twice a year at Build-A-Cell workshops,
and we have weekly international virtual seminars
with recordings available online.
We have year-round working groups,
preparing policy guidelines and shared protocols,
and we're training students
and growing connections with other fields
to make some of those applications I was talking about,
distributed to the broader scientific community.
We also talk to the public about engineering synthetic life.
So the ultimate goal of our community
is to build a synthetic living organism.
And we have to do that collaborating
across geographical and institutional boundaries.
We really want people from different universities
in different countries to work together,
contributing to solving this biggest puzzle of biology.
And we want building international distributed network
of laboratories engineering living organisms.
The end result will be a fully understandable
synthetic life cell,
and the existence of a united international community.
Training researchers in-field,
operating across geographical boundaries,
will help us build a new model of scientific collaboration.
In the last few centuries,
we went from engineering in steel to engineering electrons,
and biological engineering is just now catching up.
Building synthetic cells, we're right now
moving on to the next step of using biological parts
to engineer new types of life.
Our synthetic cell community is always open for feedback,
and always willing to talk to people.
And we can talk to people from other fields.
Anyone really who wants to learn
about building life from scratch.
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