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Comment by PaulHoule | original | For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
[−]PaulHoule · 2026-07-01 Wed 15:28 UTC · link
It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery.

Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!

This is more like it

https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...

but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"