From the Origin of Life to Synthetic Biology

摘要

Synthetic biology aims at engineering cells to produce systems that behave as living factories.Bacterial genome analysis shows us that cells are already organized as if somewhat engineered,combining an ancestral genome meant to construct,replicate,maintain and repair the cell processes with a set of genes allowing the cell to develop in a particular niche.This organization,which tells us something about the origin of life,should be preserved-and perhaps improved-in our synthetic attempts.