#artificial cell

Scientists create basic artificial cell from silicon that "can produce proteins from DNA"

Weizmann Institute team reports on its groundbreaking cell-on-a-chip that fulfills a longstanding dream of mimicking the dynamics of a living cell.

Years of intense lab work in Israel have led to the world’s first artificial cell-on-a-chip, an exciting development with many potential applications.

“The idea to mimic a living cell is a longstanding dream shared by many,” Weizmann Institute of Science Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv tells ISRAEL21c. “If we can build a primitive model of something so complex, we can possibly understand the dynamics of protein synthesis better.”

Bar-Ziv began this project as independent researcher after his post-doc at Rockefeller University in New York 12 years ago. “It took that long to get it to work,” the physicist says.

10 Medical Technologies That Could Shape The Future

It goes without saying that our society is moving faster than it ever has in the past. As medical technology surges forward with unprecedented speed and accuracy, many of us are left in the ensuing dust storm of obsolete procedures that were commonplace mere decades ago. But if we look up and gaze into the near future, we can see the beginnings of a whole new world of medical treatments that the…

Towards a Minimal Cell A Gallery of Giant Liposomes  by Jorge Bernardino de la Serna University of Southern Denmark

One of the most ambitious endeavors of synthetic biology is creating "minimal cells" that fully recapitulate the functions of a natural cell—they capture energy, maintain ion gradients, store information, and mutate.

Although such technologies are still far on the horizon, researchers have made great progress in creating "semi-synthetic cells" that can mimic specific cellular tasks, such as protein production and synthesis of lipid membranes.

Many of these artificial cells reside inside liposomes, artificial vesicles each comprised of a lipid bilayer.

Technical Details Each micrograph shows a giant liposome ~20-50µm in diameter comprised of fats and proteins from the surface of the mammalian lung alveoli without any chemical treatment. The liposomes are directly isolated from a lung lavage.

Each micrograph was acquired at a different temperature or has varying composition of native fats and proteins.

Images obtained with a Laser Scanning Confocal inverted microscope with either conventional fluorescent excitation or two-photon excitation.