The Santa Fe Institute and George Mason University are co-organizing the meeting on Minimal Life to be held in Arlington, Virginia in August 2009. During the past 50 years the concept of minimal life has entered biology in a number of ways starting with the search for the smallest living cell, then the smallest genome, the smallest free living cell, and following on with the minimum defined growth medium and the minimum artificial system capable of growth and replication. Minimality has been approached both structurally, as above, and functionally, as in synthetic biology searches for minimal recombinable functional units, or attempts in the origin of life community to identify minimal necessary levels of exogenous support or control. Topics to be covered include: Minimal-genome autotrophs and near-autotrophs; experimental genome reduction and characterization; bioenergetic trade-offs and minimal metabolic requirements; minimally complex ecosystems and geochemical environments; minimality of chemical cycles; minimal functional RNAs and replicators; minimal evolvable systems; functional decomposition of metabolism; minimal functional units such as BioBricks; symbiosis, syntrophy, and ecological constraints; engineered systems capable of reproduction; and cooperative information processing and information-sharing. The participants will cover a broad range of expertise from microbiology to physics and share a strong desire to communicate across the disciplines to seek both empirical generalizations and underlying principles. The kind of meeting envisioned is not a presenting of the latest results but more a serious dialog and attempt to focus on what minimal means in this context and what this has to tell us about biological theory.
The meeting is co-sponsored by the Physics of Living Systems program in the Physics Division and the three clusters in the Molecular and Cell Biology Division at NSF.
