Will help to create advanced artificial life.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BANGALORE: Scientists are inching closer to developing artificial protocell – the simplest form of life that resulted in the evolution of living organisms in earth.
The new artificial protocell will help scientists to create advanced artificial life that examine systems related to life and its evolution, through the use of computer models, robotics, and biochemistry.
Even though protocells are the simplest and the most primitive forms of life, this is the first time that scientists have successfully created an artificial protocell.
One of the major caveats for scientist in making the protocells is creating the information strings inherited by cell offspring like the protocells.
The information string of the protocells is similar to that of DNA and RNA. The complex instructions in the string are necessary for the cells to divide and for metabolism.
The new discovery was done by a group of researchers in the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLINT), Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark.
The scientists created the possible protocell using the software program-based simulations, which is otherwise called “soft approach” of creating artificial life. The other methods of creating artificial life are hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry.
Head of FLINT, Professor Steen Rasmussen said, “Finding mechanisms to create information strings are essential for researchers working with artificial life.”
He added: “In our computer simulation – our virtual molecular laboratory – information strings began to replicate quickly and efficiently as expected. However, we were struck to see that the system quickly developed an equal number of short and long information strings and further that a strong pattern selection on the strings had occurred.”
Rasmussen said, “we could see that only very specific information patterns on the strings were to be seen in the surviving strings. The explanation had to be found in the way the strings interacted with each other.”
The self-organizing autocatalytic network was made using a virtual pot, to which professor Rasmussen and his colleagues added the soft ingredients to form information strings.
Autocatalytic network is a molecule hub, where each molecule acts as a catalyst in the production of other molecules. A new molecule is created by a single chemical reaction in the network; and each chemical reaction gets catalysed by at least one molecule in the network.
This chain chemical reaction will create a network that shows primitive form of metabolism and information string, that recreates itself over and over from generations to generations.
According to Rasmussen “We might have discovered a process similar to the processes that initially sparked the first life. We of course don’t know if life actually was created this way – but it could have been one of the steps. Perhaps a similar process created sufficiently high concentrations of longer information strings when the first protocell was created.”
The research appeared in the science journal Europhysics Letters.
1 Comment
These Experiments will have long standing side effects on Humans, It is better to stop and anti-promote such experiments worldwide.