The next big step toward the creation of life in the lab, Joyce says, will be to engineer (or evolve) a set of synthetic molecules that can perform metabolism as well as replication. Geneticist Jack W. Szostak of Harvard Medical School has developed nonbiological proteins that bind ATP, an energy-carrying chemical crucial to metabolism. Szostak's lab is also attempting to fashion protocells that encase RNA within tiny spheres of fatty acids, called micelles, that can form, merge and replicate spontaneously.

Even if biochemists do manage to cobble RNA and other basic compounds into some form of synthetic life, the engineered system will probably be so complex at first that it will hardly prove that natural life began in some similar way, four billion years ago. Joyce's replicators consist of a mere 50 chemical letters, but the odds of such a sequence appearing by chance are roughly one in 1030, he notes. "If it were six or even 10 letters long, then I'd say we might be in the realm of plausibility, where one could imagine them assembling spontaneously" in the primordial soup.

From Test-Tube Life to Diagnostic Tools

Creating life in the laboratory would be a momentous occasion for humanity, even if it is more molecular than Frankensteinian. But there may be more mundane uses for such chemistry. A paper in press at Nature Biotechnology, Gerald F. Joyce says, describes how his lab at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., has modified RNA replicators so that they must perform a biochemical function to reproduce. The winners of that evolutionary race will be good candidates for a medical diagnostic, he thinks. Scott K. Silverman of the University of Illinois says the idea has merit: "Suppose you need to do detection in a dirty environment with lots of different chemicals present say you want to find Salmonella inside peanut butter. That's hard to do without purification steps. It would be useful to be able to evolve the diagnostic system so that it still finds the signal despite all the noise." W.W.G.

This article was originally published with the title Evolution in a Bottle.

11 Comments

1. 1. jameylynne 09:15 AM 3/24/09

   Interesting how the stubborn RNA system paralells the 3 billion year stubborn refusal of life to change until the cambrian explosion, isn't it?

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2. 2. lhall1 09:40 AM 3/24/09

   Someone ought to proofread these articles for punctuation before they're posted.

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3. 3. billypilgrim 11:18 AM 3/24/09

   The article states "Joyce's replicators consist of a mere 50 chemical letters, but the odds of such a sequence appearing by chance are roughly one in 1030, he notes." I believe that should be one in 10^30. I am assuming I agree that these articles should be proof read before publication.

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4. 4. Grumpaw in reply to lhall1 11:35 AM 3/24/09

   What or where is your beef? The spell checker seems on. Is there and automaton available for comma checking?

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5. 5. katesisco 12:23 PM 3/24/09

   Just read Zimmer's Microcosm and the last chapter deals with rna infected with virus created dna. Forterre proposes that it happened 3 separate times and the first thing I thought was ...why not 1 or 1,000 xs?
   What we see is life abundant being sieved down to a few to start over. So, why not thousands of virus infected rna creating dna and being sieved down to only 3? Just can't get the Burgess shale out of my mind and Dr Ager's book on Catastrophism notes another place similar in Europe so why not? We are told that we were sieved down to a few thousand in recent times, only 70,000 years ago, so why a massive explosion of life initially only to be sieved?

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6. 6. Johnay in reply to Grumpaw 12:34 PM 3/24/09

   He said "someone" not "something". Someone being the editorial staff that a magazine presumably has, or should have.

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7. 7. Marcelo II in reply to billypilgrim 12:39 PM 3/29/13

   You are right! I have the paper edition (brazilian version), and it's writen 10^30.

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8. 8. Marcelo II in reply to Marcelo II 01:21 PM 3/29/13

   Actually, the right number is ≈10^64,4830748724720375.
   
   This is the difference between the number presented in the article and the real one:
   
   10^30:
   1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000
   
   ≈10^64,4830748724720375:
   30.414.093.201.713.400.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000
   
   Marcelo, II

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9. 9. Marcelo II 01:25 PM 3/29/13

   Sorry, there wasn't enough space:
   
   30.414.093.201.713.400.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.
   000.000.000.000.000.000
   

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10. 10. Marcelo II 01:27 PM 3/29/13

    Last try:
    
    30.414.093.201.713.400.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000
    000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000
    

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11. 11. Marcelo II 01:30 PM 3/29/13

    Please, notice that there is a comma in the number, so it's ≈10^64.

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