Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Researchers One Step Closer To Creating Life

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mad-science dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute are potentially one step closer to creating life. In an experiment they recently created enzymes that can replicate and evolve. 'It kind of blew me away,' said team member Tracey Lincoln of the Scripps Research Institute, who is working on her Ph.D. 'What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting.'"

4 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Here's an NPR story by Seakip18 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's a bit nicer than the print article: Here

    They are very clear in saying that what they have created is "NOT ALIVE."

    This is very interesting work.

    --
    import system.cool.Sig;
    1. Re:Here's an NPR story by ortholattice · · Score: 3, Informative

      An article that provides a little more technical detail is Chemists edge closer to recreating early life. In particular, it mentions that the complexity of the system is only about 140 nucleotides, which I find quite amazing. By contrast, the simplest known independently self-reproducing organism (i.e. not a virus, etc. dependent on a host and using the host's reproduction machinery) is the Mycoplasma genitalium with 582970 base pairs of DNA. So this new system shows that independent self-reproduction is possible with dramatically reduced complexity.

  2. Unintelligent design by tgibbs · · Score: 4, Informative

    the enzymes are being intelligently designed . . .

    Not entirely. According to the paper, they were in part designed by in vitro evolution, an "unintelligent" design method that makes use of random mutation and selection to derive better enzymes. The power of "unintelligent" design mechanisms (of which evolution is one) is that they do not require that the specific solution to a design problem be known in advance.

  3. Re:Not life...not even close by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    You quoted the article, but you didn't read it. This is a huge breakthrough. As in Nobel Prize level. An RNA molecule that is able to directly self-replicate has never been seen before. Your first link is to a structure of an RNA enzyme, not an RNA that is able to make more copies of itself. You're equating a machine that makes lampshades to a lampshade making lampshades. The other link, just because I don't know exactly how the Sun came to be means that it doesn't shine? What exactly is the point of this?