Building Life from Scratch with Kerstin Göpfrich

What It Covers

Kerstin Göpfrich explains her work creating synthetic cells from scratch using RNA nanotechnology, aiming to achieve the transition from complex chemistry to simple biology and create life capable of open-ended evolution.

Key Questions Answered

• •RNA nanotechnology toolkit: Göpfrich designs synthetic genes computationally that fold into functional structures during transcription, creating cytoskeletal mimics and nanopores without proteins, reducing complexity from 150 required components to RNA-only systems for basic cellular functions.
• •Death enables evolution: Population-level mortality proves essential for Darwinian evolution in minimal synthetic cells. Without death, exponential growth depletes resources and prevents survival-of-the-fittest selection pressure, making programmed cell death a necessary design feature for evolvable synthetic life.
• •Open-ended evolution target: The goal extends beyond Darwinian evolution to systems with vast evolutionary landscapes where current genotypes occupy minimal space, allowing serendipitous changes and emergent properties that increase complexity over time rather than optimizing only for survival.
• •RNA stability breakthrough: Folding RNA into origami nanostructures creates room-temperature stability for days versus inherent instability of linear mRNA, enabling better therapeutic packaging on smaller footprints and advancing the thirty-billion-dollar RNA therapeutics market beyond current cold-chain limitations.