Laura Sierra Heras

The paper designs and builds a partial synthetic genome that can be expressed in a cell-free system and replicated, demonstrating a proof-of-concept for a minimal synthetic cell.

This paper introduces autocatalytic selection (ACS) to integrate biological functions in vitro by linking gene activity to DNA replication through feedback loops, demonstrating selection of transcription, nucleotide synthesis, and beta-galactosidase activity.

This paper engineers synthetic cells capable of DNA self-replication, transcription-translation, and membrane synthesis, showing genetic factors dominate over metabolic interactions in module integration.