The de novo construction of a living organism is a compelling vision. Despite the astonishing technologies developed to modify living cells, building a functioning cell “from scratch” has yet to be accomplished. The pursuit of this goal alone has─and will─yield scientific insights affecting fields as diverse as cell biology, biotechnology, medicine, and astrobiology. Multiple approaches have aimed to create biochemical systems manifesting common characteristics of life, such as compartmentalization, metabolism, and replication and the derived features, evolution, responsiveness to stimuli, and directed movement. Significant achievements in synthesizing each of these criteria have been made, individually and in limited combinations. Here, we review these efforts, distinguish different approaches, and highlight bottlenecks in the current research. We look ahead at what work remains to be accomplished and propose a “roadmap” with key milestones to achieve the vision of building cells from molecular parts.

中文翻译：

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构建合成细胞─从技术基础设施到细胞实体

从头构建生物体是一个令人信服的愿景。尽管已经开发出了令人惊叹的改造活细胞的技术，但“从头开始”构建功能细胞尚未实现。仅对这一目标的追求已经并将产生影响细胞生物学、生物技术、医学和天体生物学等多个领域的科学见解。多种方法旨在创建表现出生命共同特征的生化系统，例如区室化、新陈代谢和复制以及衍生特征、进化、对刺激的反应和定向运动。在综合这些标准中的每一个方面都取得了重大成就，无论是单独的还是有限的组合。在这里，我们回顾这些努力，区分不同的方法，并强调当前研究的瓶颈。我们展望了仍有待完成的工作，并提出了一个包含关键里程碑的“路线图”，以实现从分子部分构建细胞的愿景。