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"THE CLANKING REPLICATOR" was an engineering dream of a self-replicating machine. But programmable synthetic DNA robots can replicate, self-repair and most importantly, because of DNA mutations, evolve. Thus, they resemble viruses, which operate at the border of old definitions for life. This resemblance to viruses has been missed in the literature. It means that synthetic DNA robots are as alive as viruses. This is a milestone of historic proportions but has gone, it seems, unnoticed. View in LinkedIn

HORTA THINKING. "The Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon-based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon-based." The answer you get depends on the questions you ask. https://lnkd.in/dGbsBxV View in LinkedIn

"SYDNEY BRENNER has expanded the genetic alphabet by adding two new nucleobases, Z and P, potentially making a wider array of genes and proteins." A whole new frontier. https://lnkd.in/dYQeS-P View in LinkedIn

HUGE STEP. "Holliger and his team engineered enzymes that helped six types of XNA to assemble and replicate genetic messages. The enzymes transcribed DNA into the various XNAs, then back into new DNA strands — with 95% accuracy or more. For the first time, this confirms that replication, heredity and evolution are possible in these alternative backbones." (XDNA = xeno-nucleic acids). https://lnkd.in/d7dNEeN View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC SPECIES. "Unlike the first synthetic cells made in 2010, in which Venter’s team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, copied an existing bacterial genome and transplanted it into another cell, the genome of the minimal cells is like nothing in nature. Venter says that the cell, which is described in a paper released on 24 March in Science, constitutes a brand new, artificial species." http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633 View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL POLYMERS EVOLVE. "We also select XNA aptamers, which bind their targets with high affinity and specificity, demonstrating that beyond heredity, specific XNAs have the capacity for Darwinian evolution and folding into defined structures. Thus, heredity and evolution, two hallmarks of life, are not limited to DNA and RNA but are likely to be emergent properties of polymers capable of information storage." (XDNA = xeno-nucleic acids). https://lnkd.in/dbgtZme View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL ARTIFICIAL DNA. "We refer to the cell we have created as being a synthetic cell because it is a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

START WITH CODE. "We now show that it is possible to reverse this and synthesize cells starting from this digitized information." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

1010-GATC. "We call this digitizing biology." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

DNA SOFTWARE. "Life is a DNA software system. All living things are solely reducible to DNA and the cellular apparatus it uses to run on. The DNA software both creates and directs the more visible "hardware" of life such as proteins and cells." (Craig Venter) https://lnkd.in/dmEGVWN View in LinkedIn