5. Synthetic Life
Ok, so a synthetic microbe may not fall strictly in the realm of exploration, but it is one of the holy grails of astrobiology – one that would change how we understand life’s origins and inform our search for life beyond Earth.
In 2010, Craig Venter and his coterie of scientists announced that they created the first “synthetic bacterial cell.” After the flashbulbs faded, it became clear that, as exciting as the discovery was, it was a far cry from the more fundamental quest to create life from scratch. For one thing, the Venter team chemically assembled DNA bases of a naturally occurring genome. For another, the recipient organism was a well-characterized, preexisting organism; ultimately, the experiment was a genome transplant.
Generating a viable cell from scratch is an enormous challenge. There are a lot of steps from prebiotic soup to squirmy microbe, but teams around the world are beginning to clear some of the early hurdles. In January, a UC San Diego-Harvard team showed how simple abiotic reactions can generate membrane-like containers – prerequisites that would create a barrier between life-sustaining reactions and the outside world of chaotic chemistry. Several key challenges remain (among them how to create the first self-replicating information-storing molecule) and 2012 will no doubt see continued progress.
Image: Synthetic life created by Craig Venter. (Science/AAAS)