Blog 10: Synthetic Cells - Being Able to Build Life from Scratch

Hey everyone! We’ve spent the last few blogs diving into how scientists can edit DNA with tools like CRISPR and even program living cells using gene circuits. But what if I told you that SynBio has improved to the point where scientists are not just editing life, but creating it from scratch?

Today I will be talking about synthetic cells, where scientists have learned how to literally “build” life. I’ll dive into what synthetic cells are, how they’re made, and why this is one of the most mind-blowing areas of SynBio today.

What Are Synthetic Cells?                                                                                                          Synthetic cells are man-made cells that mimic the structure and function of real biological cells. However, unlike natural cells, which evolve over billions of years, synthetic cells are designed and assembled by humans.

There are two main approaches to making synthetic cells:

• Top-down approach: Here, scientists take an existing simple organism and remove genes until only the bare essentials remain. It’s like stripping a car down to its engine, wheels, and gas pedal.
  
  

• Bottom-up approach: For this one, scientists build cells from non-living parts, like synthetic membranes and lab-made DNA, to mimic life without starting from a living organism at all.

Major Breakthroughs in Synthetic Cell:                                                                                Now that you know what synthetic cells are, let me show you some of the breakthroughs this technology has already had.

May 20th, 2010 – First Synthetic Cell Created

In 2010, a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) created the first self-replicating bacterial cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They named it Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0.

Here’s what they did:

First, they synthesized the organism’s entire genome. Using a computer, they went through more than 1 million base pairs of DNA. From there, they transplanted it into another bacterial cell that has its original DNA removed. Then, the new cell began to grow and divide, completely controlled by the synthetic genome. 

This was the first time in history that a living organism had been powered by human-made DNA. In fact, it's probably the first time we’ve seen humans be able to create life. 

March 25th, 2016 – The Minimal Cell Six years later, Venter’s team created JCVI-syn3.0, a version of the synthetic cell with only 473 genes, the smallest number ever recorded for a self-replicating organism. For context, humans have about 20,000 genes.

They did this by cutting away everything non-essential, they gave scientists a map of what’s absolutely necessary for life. This “minimal cell” is just like the stripped-down car I was talking about earlier, literally stripped down to only the essential tools it needs for life and has become a key tool for understanding biology at its core. 

2022–2024 – Building Cells from the Bottom Up While Venter’s work focused on trimming down living cells, other researchers are building synthetic cells entirely from scratch. Labs around the world are now constructing “protocells” that can replicate RNA, respond to chemical stimuli, or even divide and grow

One example comes from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where scientists used droplets of fatty acids and synthetic enzymes to mimic a cell’s metabolism. These bottom-up approaches could one day lead to programmable synthetic organisms that don’t rely on natural biology at all.

Why Are Synthetic Cells a Big Deal? After learning what Synthetic Cells are and seeing what breakthroughs have already been made, you still may be wondering, why would someone go through all of this trouble to build life from scratch?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Understanding Life – By building the simplest cells possible, scientists can uncover which genes are absolutely essential for survival, division, and communication. It helps us understand what life is in more depth.
   
   

2. Custom Organisms – Imagine synthetic cells engineered to clean up oil spills, capture carbon dioxide, or even produce medicine inside the human body. Because they’re designed from the ground up, they can be tailored for specific tasks without the “extra baggage” of natural cells. If we were to continue in these man-made cells, this “imagining” could all be real.
   
   

3. Safe and Controlled – Synthetic cells are often non-living or semi-living, meaning they’re less likely to reproduce out of control or mutate in unexpected ways. That makes them ideal for lab experiments and therapeutic uses.

Last Words:                                                                                                                             From gene editing to gene programming and now to building life from scratch, SynBio keeps proving that it’s not just the future of science but the future of life. I hope you learned today that we now have the ability to not only edit cells, but make them from scratch to do whatever purposes we need them to. Synthetic cells might sound like they're made up, but they’re already helping us ask better questions, make better medicines, and imagine brand-new forms of life.

Thanks for reading today’s blog, I’ll see you for next week’s topic!

— Aidan Kincaid