What distinguishes life from non-living matter?
A synthetic or artificial cell mimics the structures and behaviour of a real cell: it is an object distinct from its environment, it uses and processes resources according to its own metabolism but is built from synthetic material.
These artificial cells have potential applications in many fields and may be useful for building the theory of the origin of life.
with Alessia Faggian and Adriano Caliari, Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology University of Trento
Lab: Micropropagation techniques