Science Alert
19 September 2022
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have taken a major step forward in synthetic biology by designing a system that performs several key functions of a living cell, including generating energy and expressing genes.
Their artificially constructed cell even transformed from a sphere shape to a more natural amoeba-like shape over the first 48 hours of ‘life’, indicating that the proto-cytoskeletal filaments were working (or, as the researchers put it, were “structurally dynamic over extended time scales”).