Originally Posted by fuzyfuzer

i think yu guys are going a bit far with this. these are brety limited structures and they don't have any DNA according to the article. all that they are capable of doing is to express a single protein/enzyme. it is much harder to enginer an entire organism because you have to work with a lot of genes, humans have 30,000 genes but we use at least 100,000 proteins/enzymes. this means we have genes that code for more than one protein. also i wouldn't call this artifical life as muc as i would call it a new species, because unless i am misunderstanding the article all they did was create a cell wall, take the organelles from e coli and then strip the genetic information so they could produce whatever they want. they didn't create anything artifical they just recombined what already existed.