A 555-million-year-old worm had a predilection for turning right, possibly indicating the oldest known example of handedness.

Although these worms lacked limbs and so couldn’t be considered left- or right-handed in the way that we understand, the development of a tendency to favour one side over another is evidence of an advanced nervous system.

It remains a feature of free-living mobile life today, but until this discovery, it wasn’t thought to have emerged until the Cambrian Period, which began around 541 million years ago.

at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues analysed 100 fossil specimens of a small flatworm-like creature, Spriggina floundersi, collected in South Australia over recent decades.

These animals lived during the Ediacaran Period, when multicellular life first became widespread. It preceded the Cambrian explosion, when animal life diversified dramatically and many groups of animals first appeared.

Spriggina lived in what was, half a billion years ago, a shallow ocean and is thought to have foraged on or close to the seafloor, moving by wriggling to the left or right.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Earth Edition

Sign up to newsletter

“We have around 50 specimens of Spriggina that are clearly bent,” says Evans. Twice as many of the fossilised worms are bent to the left than to the right, he says. This means the creature itself bent to the right, as the specimens are mirror-image impressions of the animals, made when storms buried them in sand.

“This appears to be statistically significant and matches what biologists find when they study handedness in different animals today,” says Evans. “Some specimens have multiple bends to both the right and left, suggesting that they all could bend both ways, which makes sense if you don’t want to be stuck moving in a circle.”

While the majority seem to demonstrate right-handedness, it is hard to tell if any were left-handed, he says. “I imagine it’s like taking a picture of 100 people waving with one hand today. You would likely be able to count that more people are waving with their right hand, but you wouldn’t be able to tell who is right- or left-handed.”

Discoveries like this demonstrate that many foundational characteristics that are common to a variety of animals today, such as the ability to move around, bilateral symmetry and handedness, evolved in the Ediacaran, says Evans.

In the Cambrian, organisms built on that foundation to become more complex, for example adding legs to move more efficiently, becoming “less alien and more like the major groups of animals we know today”, says Evans. “This is cool because it suggests that, while the Cambrian was an amazing time in animal evolution, those organisms didn’t just come out of nowhere: they built on the foundations established in the Ediacaran.”

“The presence of handedness in any kind of functional asymmetry, really deep into the fossil record, gives us important and interesting information about how these behaviours have evolved and how deeply in time they emerged,” says at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

A living organism is made from components that aren’t themselves living. This simple statement has profound implications. For one, it means that there is no mystical force that animates us and other life forms. For another, it means that it should be possible to build a life form from scratch – and we are now a step closer to doing so.

Artificial life has been the guiding light of synthetic biology for some time. In 2010, biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California synthesised the stripped-down genome of a bacterium and inserted it into the chassis of another cell, emptied of its own DNA. The resulting organism, with a record-low number of genes (473) was able to grow and reproduce. But even then, scientists didn’t understand what a third of those genes were doing, or whether they were even needed. Instead of rebooting an existing cell with a synthetic genome, we need to build an organism from the ground up.

That is what scientists at the University of Missouri are now attempting. The SpudCell – named both to evoke Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, and for its resemblance to a potato – is an entity based on just 36 genes. It self-assembled when the genes were supplied with all the building blocks necessary for life, forming cell-like bubbles and making proteins.

SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life

But that’s it. The SpudCell can only make proteins because it is supplied with ribosomes, the crucial cell components that make proteins. It can’t metabolise food, supply itself with energy or reliably divide and reproduce. It isn’t alive, and it needs intensive care just to perform its basic functions. Nevertheless, the SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life. If a modern living cell is a jet airliner, the SpudCell is the rickety wooden-and-cotton proto-airplane made by the Wright brothers.

Better versions will soon follow, with potentially transformative applications. The hope is that synthetic cells will one day be able to supply materials that are currently derived from fossil fuels, such as plastics, fuels and fertiliser. That is keenly needed. But the work in understanding how a living entity operates will shed light on what life needs, and how it emerges from dead materials. If we crack this ultimate mystery, synthetic biology will have really delivered.

• The importance of the human-animal bond in pet longevity
• How to stave off chronic inflammation in our pets
• Why nutrition and dental health are the fundamentals of keeping our pets healthy
• The barriers vets have to overcome when caring for our pets
• Why prevention is always better than cure.

The “SpudCell” is being proclaimed by its creators as a major advance in synthetic biology. Some of this hype is justified – yes, it’s a cell, but perhaps not quite what you could call a living cell. It has 36 genes that allow it to copy DNA and replicate in a primitive way, but it needs a lot of outside help and fails after five or so divisions. That is, however, much more than any other team has achieved, so it is arguably the greatest feat of bioengineering to date.

Created by at the University of Minnesota and her colleagues, the team is now making the SpudCell project open source so it can be developed further and even made capable of dividing indefinitely. Here’s what you need to know:

What is the SpudCell?

It’s a step towards creating a minimal life form whose functions are fully understood. Previous attempts involved deleting genes from bacterial cells whose genomes are small to start with. For instance, in 2016, a bacterium with 901 genes was stripped down so it had just 473 genes. Adamala’s team did things the other way round, starting with just 36 genes. These mostly come from E. coli bacteria, but there are also some from phage viruses that infect bacteria and one for a fluorescent protein from jellyfish to help make the cells visible.

So, is it alive?

No. It can do some of the things that living cells do, such as replicating its genes and dividing, but it doesn’t do them well and it needs a lot of outside help just to do them badly. For instance, the researchers have demonstrated evolution in the sense that when they introduced a beneficial mutation, those cells did better. But the mutation had to be introduced deliberately rather than occurring spontaneously. “I think I would be satisfied with calling it living if it’s replicating indefinitely and if it’s capable of Darwinian evolution,” says Adamala.

Can we really call it a synthetic cell, then?

That depends on how you define things. It is a synthetic cell in the sense that it has been put together in a lab and does some of the things a cell does. But it’s been made using parts of existing cells – mainly those 36 genes – rather than being created entirely from scratch. It could be thought of as an extremely stripped-down E. coli bacterium with a few additions from other viruses, bacteria and jellyfish.

How was it assembled?

The researchers engineered the 36 genes into seven circular pieces of DNA. They made lots of copies of them and put them into a solution containing all the other things the cells need, like the building blocks of DNA and proteins, and fatty molecules that spontaneously form cell-like bubbles. Some of these bubbles ended up with all seven parts of the genome.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Daily

Sign up to newsletter

The cells are then kept alive by two of the genes coding for proteins that form pores in the membrane, allowing some small molecules to enter. Larger molecules are supplied in the form of small bubbles that fuse with the cells. So the cell is supplied with all the building blocks of life, because it can’t make any itself.

How do the cells divide?

The team added large proteins to the solution that bind to one of the protein pores that protrude from the membrane. These jostle for space and cause the membrane to bend, says Adamala, which can result in part of the SpudCell budding off and forming a separate bubble of its own. It isn’t an equal division into two parts, and the resulting “daughter” cells have a random selection of the circular bits of DNA, so many lack the full sets of genes.

Why not just put all the genes on one piece of DNA?

This would be better to ensure daughter cells get all of the genes, but it is very hard to work with such large pieces of DNA, says Adamala. “Once we have a genome we’re happy with, it definitely has to go on a single large [piece].”

Why do the cells stop doing anything after about five rounds of division?

The team doesn’t know for sure, but the cells aren’t capable of creating their own protein-making factories, or ribosomes. They have to be supplied with them. “We’re speculating that it is because of the failure of the ribosomes [that the cells stop dividing],” says Adamala. So once the cells can make their own ribosomes, they may be able to keep dividing indefinitely. “I think it is achievable very soon,” she says.

This is all very impressive, but why create SpudCell in the first place?

“We want to be able to make all petrochemicals with living biology, so we can basically move away from oil for all the climate and societal benefits,” says Adamala. Virtually all of the chemicals we depend on, from plastics to pesticides, are derived from oil and gas. Many of these chemicals are toxic, she says, and would kill normal cells that made them. But synthetic cells could be designed to tolerate them.

Could it ever be dangerous?

No. It’s a bed-ridden Frankenstein’s monster that has to be spoon-fed. There’s no danger of it running amok. And even if it really can be brought fully to life, it is unlikely to be able to survive outside a lab or factory. Existing bacteria are a far greater threat.

In this video, New Scientist CoLab partners with ocean engineering company DEEP to follow the deployment of Vanguard, the first open-ocean, ambient-pressure subsea research habitat built in over forty years. The site is Tennessee Reef off the coast of the Florida Keys. Vanguard will allow scientists and researchers to break free from the strict time limits of traditional surface diving. Featuring an integrated moon pool for entry and exit, it lets aquanauts camp out in the marine canopy of the ocean, embarking on daily 6-to-8-hour dives and processing scientific samples directly inside the habitat without bringing them to the surface.

Welcome to the new era of aquatic humanity.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Introduction: The Goal to Make Humans Aquatic
0:35 – What is Vanguard?
1:15 – Undersea Technology & The Ambient Moon Pool
2:10 – Deploying at Tennessee Reef
2:45 – Revolutionizing Marine Science & Coral Restoration
3:30 – Space Analog & Elite Team Training
4:15 – The Future: Inspiring the Next Generation of Explorers

��

FIND OUT MORE at