From
Chemical & Engineering News
Quote:
The advent of synthetic life may have gotten a bit closer. Biochemist Jack W. Szostak and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital have designed a fatty acid container that takes in building blocks from outside to supply a spontaneous DNA-copying reaction on the inside (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07018).
The synthetic biology advance, Szostak says, suggests a way by which primitive cells could have obtained nutrients, a key unknown in the origin-of-life field. It's not clear whether the earliest cells made their own components or incorporated them from outside, he says.
Modern cell membranes are barricades that require protein pumps and pores for shuttling nutrients in and out. But early membranes might not have behaved in the same way, Szostak says.
|
They created a synthetic membrane that was permeable to ribose (a sugar component of RNA) and nucleotides, but not synthetic macromolecules. Then they put a synthetic, self-replicating DNA molecule in this membrane, and put their "cell" in a solution of nucleotides. The nucleotides crossed the membrane, were assembled into DNA, and the DNA remained in the cell.
27-June-2008, 02:32 PM
Synthetic Pseudo-cell created
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
