The Evolution of Bacteria

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The smallest known genome is 474 genes and that's quite a bit of DNA. But that wouldn't be enough to power whole bacteria? Absolutely not. We've come really far in understanding how this organism works but we're still unable to take a genome, plug it into a non-living system and get life out of it. That's what my lab is trying to do with collaboration with the Craig Venter Institute people.We're trying to basically do what they did except our chassis is not alive. So when they took that artificial DNA, put it in a living cell and that living cell changed into the new cell. What we're trying to do so far unsuccessfully but we're hopefully

Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.

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Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala received her Ph.D. working with Pier Luigi Luisi at the University of Rome and Jack Szostak at Harvard. She is currently an assistant professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the Build-A-Cell international collaboration, which brings together multiple groups to work on constructing artificial life.

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