Scientists aim to introduce ‘Darwinian evolution’ through artificial life project

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European scientists have begun the work of creating simple forms of life from scratch in the laboratory, investing heavily in the development of ideas and experiments in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.

Starting with non-living chemicals, researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and demonstrate “Darwin evolution” within six years.

The €13mn “MiniLife” project, funded by the European Research Council and involving biologists and chemists from several universities, could be the first in the world to achieve the minimum standards of an artificial way of life.

Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Center for Fundamentals of Scientific Theory at the Parmenides Institute in Germany, who is the principal investigator of the ERC grant, says: “The breakthrough would be a major breakthrough in basic science.” “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing human dream.”

John Sutherland, who works on early life chemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing global effort to “create leaner life processes”.

Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by a never-ending desire to understand how life came to be on Earth and whether it has existed elsewhere in the visible universe.”

Some artificial life researchers are working with the known building blocks of life on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, on the other hand, aims to start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.

Szathmáry said: “We are apart of the known forms of life because they are creatures that have evolved very much, and they simplify so that they can reach a form that is insignificant.”

MiniLife researchers are currently testing four applications that may, individually, or in combination, be developed to form the basis of a minimal life. They are all “autocatalytic”, an important property for reproduction where the chemical reaction is produced by its products.

Another candidate is the formose reaction. This process, discovered in the 19th century, turns a very simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly complex series of sugar molecules. When the reaction is fed with formaldehyde, the behavior of the droplets varies according to the structure of the sugar in them.

Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife researcher at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, said: “Some grow faster and divide faster than others.” “We end up with the emergence of something biologically equivalent, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but with a very simple chemical structure.”

A formose-based system must be able to demonstrate reliable inheritance – the transmission of acquired characteristics from one generation to another – possibly together with one of the other systems being evaluated.

The six-year timeframe is ambitious, said Griffiths, who hopes the project will be able to “reveal Darwin’s naturalism”. At least that would include a system that can change between two countries with inheritance in different areas, similar to the famous pepper moth whose wings are white in clean areas and black when it lives in areas contaminated with a dark surface.

Sijbren Otto, a professor of systemic chemistry at the University of Groningen and another member of the MiniLife team, said his main motivation was “a fascination with the nature and origin of life. Although the molecules we produce will probably not be the same ones from which life began 3.8bn years ago, the mechanisms we hope to uncover will be very important to understanding what happened. at that time.”

Last month an international group of researchers warned of “unprecedented risks” posed by one aspect of artificial biology. They said “mirror life” – engineered bacteria that mirror the structure of natural microbes – could compromise the immunity of humans, other animals and plants.

When asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said that its creation was “too difficult to have any activity outside of a highly controlled lab environment” and that it does not pose a public threat. danger.

However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for research. “Now is the time to think ahead to where the research might lead,” Otto said.