Kate Adamala

There is no natural living cell that we can have a full chemical ingredient list for.

And we don't know all the genes even in the simplest cell.

So it's really kind of like a black box.

If you look at the entirety of biology, it actually, and I'm going to piss off a lot of biologists by saying that, but biology from the chemical point of view is actually really boring.

It uses only 22 amino acids out of hundreds possible amino acids.

And that's another motivation for engineering cells from scratch, is we want to be able to invent things, to do things that biology never bothered doing.

The synthetic cell would be like a bookstore that you're filling one shelf at a time.

You know what sections you want.

And using Drew's analogy, you're filling it to have all the books that you're interested in.

But because you're putting them in, you know where they go.

You know what books you put in and you know where they're supposed to move.

It's still tiny, but because we built it from the parts that we know about and we know what they're supposed to be doing, then we can actually understand and most importantly, predict where they go.

Because it's not just about understanding where they used to go.

It's about predicting where they are going to go where you do something.

And that would be a synthetic cell.

It would be a bookstore with a really good inventory because we know what goes into a synthetic cell and we can grow it

And that's the most fascinating to me as an engineer is I don't want to just build something complex.

I actually want to know why it works the way it does.

The builder cell is different than just the construction of a cell with synthetic genome, because there was a living recipient cell that was the recipient of that genome transplantation.

So it wasn't building a cell from non-living components.