Interfacing Living and Synthetic Cells as an Emerging Frontier in Synthetic Biology

The construction of artificial cells from inanimate molecular building blocks is one of the grand challenges of our time. In addition to being used as simplified cell models to decipher the rules of life, artificial cells have the potential to be designed as micromachines deployed in a host of clini...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAngewandte Chemie International Edition Vol. 60; no. 11; pp. 5602 - 5611
Main Author Elani, Yuval
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Germany Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 08.03.2021
John Wiley and Sons Inc
EditionInternational ed. in English
Subjects
artificial cells
Biology
Bionics
biotechnology
Cell culture
cellular bionics
Construction
Hybrid systems
Hybridization
Industrial applications
Minireview
Minireviews
molecular bioengineering
Motivation
Synthetic biology
synthetic biology
molecular bioengineering
biotechnology
cellular bionics
artificial cells
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Summary:The construction of artificial cells from inanimate molecular building blocks is one of the grand challenges of our time. In addition to being used as simplified cell models to decipher the rules of life, artificial cells have the potential to be designed as micromachines deployed in a host of clinical and industrial applications. The attractions of engineering artificial cells from scratch, as opposed to re‐engineering living biological cells, are varied. However, it is clear that artificial cells cannot currently match the power and behavioural sophistication of their biological counterparts. Given this, many in the synthetic biology community have started to ask: is it possible to interface biological and artificial cells together to create hybrid living/synthetic systems that leverage the advantages of both? This article will discuss the motivation behind this cellular bionics approach, in which the boundaries between living and non‐living matter are blurred by bridging top‐down and bottom‐up synthetic biology. It details the state of play of this nascent field and introduces three generalised hybridisation modes that have emerged. This Minireview outlines the state of play in the research area of cellular bionics, where biological and synthetic cells are hybridised, thus bridging the living/non‐living divide.
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ISSN:1433-7851
1521-3773
DOI:10.1002/anie.202006941