Toward Artificial Life

Fouzi Mouffouk
Biosciences Division, ANL

Assembling non-biological materials (geomaterials) into a proto-organism constitutes a bridge between nonliving and living matter. Our group has presented a simple step-by-step route to assemble a proto-organism. Many pictures have been proposed to describe this transition within the origins-of-life and artificial life communities, and more recently alternative pictures have been emerging from advances in nanoscience and biotechnology. The proposed proto-organism lends itself to both traditions and defines a new picture based on a simple idea: Given a set of required functionalities, minimize the physicochemical structures that support these functionalities, and make sure that all structures self-assemble and mutually enhance each other's existence.

The result is the first concrete, rational design of a simple physicochemical system that integrates the key functionalities in a thermodynamically favorable manner as a lipid aggregate integrates protogenes and a proto-metabolism. Under external pumping of free energy, the metabolic processes produce the required building blocks, and only specific gene sequences enhance the metabolic kinetics sufficiently for the whole system to survive. Once we figure out how to make such a proto-organism work, a whole new field of technology will spring up, which could rival or surpass even the most futuristic forms of genetic engineering. And our very concept of life will never be the same.

Relevant Publications

(1) Steen Rasussen, Liaohai Chen, David Deamer, David Krakauer, Norman Packard, Peter Stadler and Mark Bedau   “Transitions from nonliving to living Matter” Science  2004 (303), 963-965.