In the future, artifical cells may produce complex protein
structures on demand
For years, scientists around the world have dreamed of
building a complete, functional, artificial cell. Though this vision is still a
distant blur on the horizon, many are making progress on various fronts. Prof.
Roy Bar-Ziv and his research team in the Weizmann Institute’s Materials and
Interfaces Department recently took a significant step in this direction when
they created a two-dimensional, cell-like system on a glass chip. This system,
composed of some of the basic biological molecules found in cells – DNA, RNA,
proteins – carried out one of the central functions of a living cell: gene
expression, the process by which the information stored in the genes is
translated into proteins. More than that, it enabled the scientists, led by
research student Yael Heprotein yman, to obtain “snapshots” of this process in
nanoscale resolution.