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A comment on In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery. Parent comment

Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by dnautics on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @08:41PM (#11958146)
> A minimal viable cell should be able to survive on water, some dissolved gasses, and an energy source like glucose.

M. mycoides certainly does not survive on that. Mycoplasmas need cholesterol and lipids because they lack the HMGCoA reductase pathway and FAS, so all the media you grow them on are enriched for that (started as FBS, but we found horse serum worked great and was cheaper). In general, I think you need a few more things than just that for most basic life (nitrogen, phosphorus, metals)... Is using glucose cheating? Because you could use light for energy and CO2 for carbon, but that adds a ton ton ton of genes...

So this becomes a nitpicky definitional conundrum.

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Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by Sulfolobus on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:43AM (#11959618)
Hell, we found an intranuclear parasite that didn't even have its own ATP synthase, glycolytic pathway or any other obvious way to generate ATP.
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