Engineering Life

[ding]

Which part, the evolve part?

The synthesizing part.

 

[scruffy]

Agreed. Not saying they can't do it, but it looks like a tall order from reading how long they worked on a single cell.

Here's some background.

A gene that codes for a protein is linear but not contiguous. The coding occurs in small segments, that are divided by non-coding sequences called introns.

Intron - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

To get rid of the introns and assemble the protein correctly, a cell's nucleus uses a structure called a spliceosome.

Spliceosome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So far, research on the spliceosome has been most successful with simple organisms like yeast. However as with most things biological, insight is being gained where top down meets bottom up.

Bottom up involves things like how an adenovirus changes the translation logic. Top down is currently researching humans for medical reasons, like this:

Mutations in a non-coding gene associated with intellectual disability

A gene that only makes an RNA is linked to neurodevelopmental problems.

arstechnica.com