Abstract:

The earliest history of life included a series of transition from non-living matter, through prebiotic synthesis, towards the living Last Universal Common Ancestor. Our work focuses on the immediately-pre-life stage of evolution, when complex chemistry became simplest biology. 
We create synthetic minimal cells that exhibit some key properties of life, without being entirely alive. Those cells express proteins from nucleic acid genomes inside phospholipid liposomes, representing the boundary between prebiotic and Darwinian evolution.
Our synthetic cells can maintain homeostasis, they can grow, divide and evolve. The controllability and flexibility of minimal cells allow us studying chemical processes underlying major transitions in evolution. We can also explore alternative paths that terrestrial evolution did not take, with unnatural building blocks like xeno nucleic acids, noncanonical amino acids and unnatural lipids. Studying synthetic cells allows us to recreate natural evolution, as well as insights into the possibilities life could have explored elsewhere in the Universe.