Creation of artificial living system comes closer to reality

A new research has revealed that a team of scientists, in a virtual computer experiment, have discovered 'information strings' with peculiar properties, which are needed to control cell metabolism and provide the cell with instructions about how to divide and are essential for creating more advanced artificial life.

The oldest ancestor of life on Earth was a protocell, a very basic ingredient for creating more advanced artificial life, and creating it is far from simple as one of the challenges is to create the information strings, which are like modern DNA or RNA strings, that can be inherited by cell offspring, including protocells.

Researcher Steen Rasmussen from the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLINT) said that finding mechanisms to create information strings are essential for researchers working with artificial life.

Rasmussen added that they might have discovered a process similar to the processes that initially sparked the first life and they of course don't know if life actually was created this way, but it could have been one of the steps.

Rasmussen continued that perhaps a similar process created sufficiently high concentrations of longer information strings when the first protocell was created.

Rasmussen concludes that they seek ways to develop technology that's based on living and life-like processes and if they succeed, they will have a world where technological devices can repair themselves, develop new properties and be re-used.

The study is published in the journal Europhysics Letters.