Bioengineers Have Modeled The Workings of The World's Most Basic Synthetic Life Form - ScienceAlert

"What's new here is that we developed a three-dimensional, fully dynamic kinetic model of a living minimal cell that mimics what goes on in the actual cell," says University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemist Zaida Luthey-Schulten.

This updated version contains just 531,000 bases divided among 473 genes.

A few genes were popped back in, resulting in the latest version of the minimal cell: JCVI-syn3A.

Its creators have a solid idea of what genes their synthetic cell contains, though are still working out exactly what each one does.

"We developed a three-dimensional, fully dynamic kinetic model of a living minimal cell," says Luthey-Schulten.

"Our model opens a window on the inner workings of the cell, showing us how all of the components interact and change in response to internal and external cues.