carbon fixation and cytoskeleton formation tagged posts

A membrane (red outer boundary) encapsulates actin (white lines), the protein building blocks of the cytoskeleton and tissues. The actin was polymerized by coupling ATP synthesis with artificial organelles (green dots) inside the membrane. Credit: Image courtesy of the Disease Biophysics Group/Harvard University

Researchers engineered a cell-like structure that harnesses photosynthesis to perform designer reactions. In the quest to build an artificial cell, there are two approaches: The first, reengineers the genomic software of a living cell. The second, focuses on cellular hardware, building simple, cell-like structures from the ground up that mimic the function of living cells...