157 | Elizabeth Strychalski on Synthetic Cells and the Rules of Biology (opens in new tab)

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can't help but wonder whether we could do better. Using existing genomes as a starting point, biologists are getting increasingly skilled at designing organisms of our own imagination. But to do that, we need a better understanding of what different genes in our DNA actually do. Elizabeth Strychalski and collaborators recently announced the construction of a synthetic microbial organism th...