Artificially Made Cell Evolves Shockingly Fast For Unknown Reasons

a few months ago we've talked about discoveries in regards to synthetic life living organisms created entirely by combining DNA and the cell structure from various species in a sense representing a kind of a Frankenstein monster cell and in the last video that you can find in the description Japanese scientists were actually able to add genes to make this artificial cell now move around but in this video we're going to be discussing this new study that as always you can find in the description below that in a nutshell discovers something else really unusual about these synthetic cells but I guess first well hello wonderful person this is Anton let's discuss Cynthia once again the unusual bacterial organism developed by reducing DNA of a known bacteria eventually turning it into what the science is now referred to as synthetic organism something that even though it might sound controversial actually is really not mostly because of the reasons for why this was done and what the scientists are trying to learn from all of this and the idea here is really simple take a bacteria with the smooth possible genome or really any organism it doesn't actually have to be bacteria but bacteria generally have the smallest DNA of all organisms and then essentially remove anything that doesn't seem to be useful reducing DNA to the absolute minimum in order to see if it can actually still create an organism that you started with or at least something similar and so here the main point was to reduce a living organism to the absolute essential genes with only one main reason trying to understand exactly exactly what's required genetically in order to build an organism completely from scratch this actually even has a name now it's known as mycoplasma laboratorium because it's basically a bacterium produced entirely in the lab but the early research that started a couple of decades ago began with some of the bacteria with some of the smallest genome at first it was the bacteria known as mycoplasma genitalium something that's actually sexually transmitted and something that many of us do have in our bodies depending on how naughty we are but because it has a relatively small genome it was a pretty solid first Target but eventually several teams realized that this is a much better Target this particular bacterium is even simpler and in essence is a parasite living inside the intestines of various goats or a lot of other similar animals and intriguingly parasites in general because of their lifestyle tend to lose a lot of genes that are no longer required and that's because once they find a lifestyle that seems to provide them with everything they no longer need a lot of other functions and thus eventually lose a lot of genes and theoretically bacterial parasites would have the simplest genome out there and that's exactly what the science has discovered here and why they decided to use this particular bacterium bacterium whose genome is actually really small it contains approximately 901 identified genes but the thing is the majority of these genes are still unknown to us we don't really know what they do and so through sheer trial and error by removing each of the genes individually at some point various scientific teams were able to remove 41 of all of the previous genes with just 473 genes identified to be essential for this bacterium to function and to survive so basically half of the genes here were surprisingly not needed at all it's unclear if they were totally not needed but the bacterium was doing just fine without any of these genes but interestingly even here there are quite a lot of unknown genes or genes whose function is not understood also just to give you a comparison here today we believe Human Genome contains approximately 100 000 genes but only 6 000 so far have been definitively identified so here this is definitely a lot less and so 150 of these have function that is not really clear nevertheless because of this this organism is now officially known as first truly synthetic life out there but now we know that even smaller genome is technically possible by using something with an even smaller genome for example here we have something with only 169 genes and intriguing what makes this synthetic and artificial is the fact that everything here was constructed artificially by adding various genes and the cytoplasm from other cells and then putting everything together kind of like Legos in other words they knew exactly what genes to take they knew exactly what parts they take they put it all together and it seems to have worked but all this was done a while ago several years ago as a matter of fact with an older video explaining all of this and as you might learn from that recent video from just a few months ago now the scientists have also started adding a lot of other genes including genes for motility allowing these cells to move so basically now we have a moving Frankenstein's monster or I guess bacterial Frankenstein's monster but you can actually learn about all of these new advances in the link in the description with the website is actually dedicated to all of the new advances and new experiments and of course new studies about this strange synthetic organism but now we have a new discovery that's kind of difficult to explain and is definitely unexpected it's coming from this paper evolution of a minimal cell in essence testing something really simple and something that we thought we understood pretty well Evolution specifically evolution in regards to mutation of different genes and this is of course based on a lot of different experiments from the past where all of this has already been done with the order of other bacteria and a lot of other species here the main concept is Gene selection or essentially the genetic variation responsible for certain types of selection in order for the stronger organism to eventually survive but I guess one famous example being the Darwin's finches slightly different genes responsible for the slightly different beak resulted in different types of finches dominating certain types of environments only Galapagos Islands so for example if a bird had a much bigger Peak that would be much better for opening things like seeds that type of Gene would become prevalent in this particular environment and this also relates to another intriguing concept known as the population bottleneck in essence some kind of an event for example some kind of a catastrophe that dramatically reduces genetic variation even potentially leading to Extinction events suggesting that an organism would more genes and obviously more variability is more likely to survive a certain event and in some sense by creating this synthetic organism you could always see this as a kind of a population bottleneck we have this new organism that has approximately 50 percent of s genes compared to a similar bacteria from a similar environment that was not genetically modified and so at least on paper it would look like the synthetic organism would not really be very adaptable and would not be able to mutate very well as a matter of fact it might even seem like it might be prone to Extinction much easier because some of those genes that were previously removed might have had some hidden function such as providing some survival benefits and so at least on paper if we were to put both of these organisms the natural one and the modified in the same environment the Assumption here would be that the natural organism would most likely out compete the synthetic organism in most situations especially when it comes to more difficult conditions or conditions more difficult for survival since the synthetic organism just doesn't really have a lot of genes that could provide additional benefits but that's on paper that's what was assumed and that's what the scientists behind this paper wanted to test they wanted to find out if this is actually what's going to happen turns out it was the opposite and that's of course the surprising part here they introduced The Sim 3B the third generation of this organism and the original cells that were not modified to various challenging conditions for approximately 300 days this would be equivalent to about 2 000 bacterial Generations or in human terms that would be like 40 000 years they then essentially allow these organisms to do their own thing and check the results afterwards and to their surprise compared to the original the new strain was evolving approximately 40 percent faster and on top of this it didn't just evolve it seemed to have regained all of the fitness that was lost previously when many of the genes were removed and this is where I should be playing that Jurassic Park theme and quoting Jeff Goldblum when he says life uh finds a way because that's what seems to have happened here as well for reasons still not understood when placed in exactly the same conditions after 300 days the synthetic cells out computers everything else becoming the domain stream and taking over the entire environment and exactly why this is happening is anyone's gas theoretically the complexity of other cells should give them a bit of an advantage but it clearly doesn't instead giving the advantage to these synthetic cells that are able to do everything much quicker and much more efficiently on top of this you can actually see the mean difference between these cells which once again really surprised everyone the size the original cells are actually able to grow in size because they have all of the genes the artificial cells are missing sound the genes responsible for the formation of membrane and because of this they cannot expand their volume and essentially maintain their size and so even though it was preferential to grow bigger in size it these synthetic cells somehow found a way around it and managed to create all the function in it without growing bigger physically and so yeah all of this so far all these discoveries are to some extent at least for biologists kind of mind-blowing mind-blowing mean especially because at the moment it's not clear what genes were evolved why they evolved so quickly and what exactly is it about the natural selection that we still don't understand especially coming from this very unusual example because it essentially suggests that the simplest organism was able to somehow optimize much faster and eventually take over the entire environment or in biological terms it became a lot more genetically fit even though it technically shouldn't have in essence regaining all the ability that were lost when the genes were artificially removed how I was able to do so is anyone's guess okay I might have one guess but it's a very very long shot here from a lot of previous research we know bacteria are generally also very good at stealing others genes the they're basically able to share and recover genes that are often found in the environment and so because all of the bacteria work in the same environment there's maybe a slight chance for some kind of a generic mixture with the synthetic bacteria eventually recovering some of the function by basically consuming the genes from other bacteria it's a big gas there's no proof yet but at least for now that's maybe one possible explanation and so here it would be very important to test if these new bacteria the synthetic bacteria still have the same small genome or if they actually change something adopted in the process and basically consuming things from the environment we'll probably learn more about this in some of the future videos until then check out all the links in the description below check out some of the previous videos with previous discoveries about this bacterium and come back tomorrow to learn something else thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences may be supported on patreon by Juvenile membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay on the foresee tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you thank you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 265,833

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, synthia, syn3b, JCVI-syn3.0, JCVI-syn1.0, synthetic living machines, Xenopus laevis, Artificial Life, Synthetic Genome, artificial cell, artificial genome, creating artificial life, scientists create artificial life, artificial life made, creation of artificial life, artificial cell created, artificial life, created life, new artificial life, mycoplasma mycoides

Id: NfqbnKVOYtA

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023