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Comment by yread | original | For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

[−]yread · 2026-07-01 Wed 15:42 UTC · link

I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots

[−]hoppp · 2026-07-01 Wed 19:43 UTC · link

I think its more intended for manufacturing.

Custom metabolic pathways to manufacture materials could be more easily implemented with cells that are fully synthetic.

If the entire cell is synthetic its more easy to simulate it's full behavior and then it's faster to iterate on it during development.