The Hydrophilia of Lipids

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On the biochemical level, terrestrial life is kind of a boring because there's not much variety. We cannot say life as a general biochemical phenomenon does this or that because we just simply don't know it. And I really got into the whole idea of the lipid membranes. Lipid bilayers are essentially soap bubbles. They end up being spheres. Once you have lipids, you're going to have bilayer membranes. It's not healthy for a membrane to be flat. It wants to be spherical. That's why membranes form spontaneously when you drop lipids into water. The front likes water to fronts like water and staring to the water makes the membrane hide all this hydrophobicity inside

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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