Giovanni Murtas, from the Enrico Fermi Centre, University of Rome Three, Italy, plans to build a new lifeform to look at the more fundamental question of the origins of life.
Oil spill
Synthetic organisms might be able to help clear up oil spills
"We are creating these semi-synthetic minimal cells that recall the early living cells," he says.
So far, his team has successfully built a cell system that can synthesise proteins, which is important for demonstrating that a basic metabolism can be created. Replication is the next step, he explains.
"If you want to understand more about how life was set up, then you want to recreate the principal steps for life; and you can obviously learn something new about life from using this approach," Dr Murtas tells BBC News.
Ron Weiss from Princeton University, US, who is focussing on programming biological organisms, believes the technology could also have biomedical applications.
"One thing people are trying to do is to use cells as factories to make drugs or fabricate structures," he says.
New take on life
The top-down and bottom-up teams have something in common: they are mimicking what nature does already. Some scientists, though, have gone back to the drawing broad in their quest to produce synthetic life.
Steen Rasmussen from Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, is one of them.
"We are the radical kids on the block. We have abandoned so much of what traditional biology is doing. Many biologists view us as heretics," he says.
Rather than turning to biological cell design as his starting point, Dr Rasmussen is looking to see if there might be simpler structures that he can use as the basis of his synthetic organism.
He is creating a cell in which the essential parts, such as genes and metabolic chemicals, are stuck to the surface of it rather than held inside like a traditional cell.
He says: "This means you can exchange resources and waste directly with the environment and that simplifies things enormously."
tissue culture cells
Some are moving away from traditional cell structures
Synthetic biologists think that although life created by a top-down approach may be imminent, synthetic life built from the bottom up is a few more years away - at least five to 10.
However, George Attard from Southampton University, UK, adds a word or two of caution.
"The biggest challenge is not necessarily creating life, but knowing that you have created life - doing the experiment that unambiguously tells you that you've got it," he says.
Click to expand...
