How to make a cell What does it take to make a cell? Six basic properties are shared by all living cells on earth. Without wishing to sound like a textbook, let’s just enumerate them. All need: a continuous supply of reactive carbon for synthesising new organics; a supply of free energy to drive metabolic biochemistry – the formation of new proteins, DNA, and so on; catalysts to speed up and channel these metabolic reactions; excretion of waste, to pay the debt to the second law of thermodynamics and drive chemical reactions in the correct direction; compartmentalisation – a cell-like
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