Chapter 2 Nanoplant (1)
They looked down from the window and saw what looked like long, narrow greenhouses covered with transparent enclosures in the desert. Each one was about 20 meters wide. There were about a dozen in total, lined up in several rows in a square.
"Are you planting forced vegetables?" Crane asked Dyson.
"That's not a vegetable," Newton said. "What's inside isn't green, it's all black."
Yoshida took a closer look. It was true that the plants inside the house were completely black.
"There is a 'product' in there that we are currently growing. As you can see, we are cultivating it under sunlight. However, as you said, it is not an edible plant. That is artificial plant."
Yoshida and the others looked at Dyson.
"You said you made plants?" Crane asked Dyson again.
"So you made it with your nanotechnology?" Newton asked.
Dyson nodded loudly.
"That's quite difficult. If you were to create a truly living plant, you would first need to create living cells. Even that is almost impossible." Newton said.
"As you say, no one has ever created a living organism. Until now, nanotechnology has only been able to create robots that respond mechanically. Living organisms are made up of cells. Large living organisms are made up of combinations of cellular units. This is because it requires far less effort than building a large living organism all at once. Of course, the effort I'm talking about here refers to the time required for evolution. Therefore, to create a reasonably large life, we need to create small living units, or living cells."
"You guys succeeded in creating it? Let me tell you, it requires at least four conditions to be alive: reproduction, metabolism, sensitivity, and organization. Without metabolism, we cannot say they are alive. Without reproduction, there is no evolution. It is robots that keep creating the same clones in order to evolve, not life. Unless it is sensitive, meaning it reacts to the outside world and provides feedback, it is still just a robot. Finally, without the ability to organize, or self-organize, metabolism itself would be impossible. In that case, they will need help from outside. Did your cells succeed in meeting all of these conditions? " Newton said.
Dyson nodded with satisfaction.
"Yes, as you said, the goal of nanotechnology up until now, as I said earlier, has been to fit a large factory into a single chip. It will be easier to understand if you imagine a place where products are made using a conveyor belt. As items flow on the conveyor, they are processed little by little by sticking or breaking, poking, or rotating specific materials in specific locations with specific tools in a specific procedure. Everything must be performed according to the manual. All finished products are identical and are clones. No part of this process can be changed or omitted. Therefore, with this belt conveyor system, in order to make something even slightly different, it is necessary to completely replace the belt conveyor set. Even if you change just one material, you will need to replace all the tools and other items that were used for it. So this belt conveyor robot will not evolve. In the first place, real cells themselves do not use this method. Because they need to evolve. However, there is an exception, and the only part of the cell where ribosomes manufacture proteins from amino acids uses a conveyor belt system. Well, you could call it a coincidence of evolution."
Dyson walked towards the monitor again. Dyson tapped the keyboard and another screen appeared. It looked like the inside of a cell. Yoshida and his the others looked into the screen. There was a round daruma-like object in the center of the screen. There was a slight depression between the top and bottom balls, and a thin ribbon-like thread was wedged in there, and it was shifting little by little.
"This is a 3D schematic diagram of a ribosome. mRNA carries information read from DNA stored in the cell nucleus to ribosomes, where the ribosomes translate the information and synthesize proteins. This tape is the mRNA, which is read from the end and moves in sequence. After reading three bases, tRNA carries the desired amino acid and connects it with a peptide bond. It's exactly like a conveyor belt. It synthesizes proteins from DNA information with unparalleled accuracy. Do you know why? "
"It was necessary to do so.Maybe other cellular metabolic processes can be done roughly, but protein synthesis must be error-free." Newton said.
"That's right. There's another process that's extremely accurate: DNA copying. This is done by a special enzyme, and the copying error occurs only once in hundreds of millions of copies, with amazing precision. These can be called a conveyor belt system for living cells. However, the rest of the process is largely left up to chance. Intracellular metabolism is mainly carried out by the collision of other substances with proteins attached to membranes. Since the inside of a cell is an aqueous solution, the substances within it are in a state of wandering due to Brownian motion. Metabolism only occurs when the target molecule collides with membrane enzymes. Another important point is that the enzyme is attached to the membrane. Do you know why? "
Yoshida and the others tilted their heads with their mouths closed. Newton spoke again.
"If collisions occur randomly, it's probably because the probability of collisions occurring on a two-dimensional membrane is higher than that of collisions in three-dimensional space."
"That's exactly right. That's why cells are covered with a large number of membranes. In fact, most of the interior of cells is made up of membranes. Metabolism by enzymes, and the substances produced thereby, also travel across membranes to reach their destination. There's even a transport protein for that. It's like a tow truck. Now, take a look at this."
A cell covered in membranes appeared on the monitor. Various forms of enzymes were embedded within the membrane. Countless molecules were floating around inside the cell, shaking and colliding with enzymes, causing them to break down or stick together. Small molecules like inchworms were running around on the membrane, carrying the substance with them. Some of them had gathered together and moved around like centipedes with countless legs.
"Wow!" Crane said. His eyes are wide with surprise.
"Hmph," Lee said, resting his chin on his hand.
"Now, a question," Dyson continued. "How many types of substances do you think cells make? Of course, this does not include DNA or low-molecular-weight compounds."
"I'm sure there are a lot," Crane replied, waving his pen.
"What do you think?" Dyson asked Yoshida.
"About 10,000 pieces," Yoshida answered, with great guesswork.
"Okay," Lee raised his hand. "One, right?"
"No way!" Yoshida said.
"That's right, cells mainly make only one type of macromolecular compound: proteins. There are also polymeric sugars such as those found in cell walls, but they are not essential to life functions, so they are not included in the calculation. Also, ribosomes are made only of RNA, but this is also an exception."
"Oh, that makes sense." Crane tapped his forehead with his pen.
"Originally, it is said that the first life was made of only RNA. DNA was only added later to make data replication more precise..."
"So, What's your point?" Newton interjected.
"Simply put, life is basically made up of only two types of proteins: DNA and proteins. It's like all the parts in the factory are made from the same thing. Change the shape little by little. It can also be said to be a very simple design. Or you could call it a loose design. That's why it's so flexible, and even if there are some mistakes in the copying process, it still works somehow. Even within this process, there is a possibility that a system that is better than the previous one may be born, and as a result of accumulating these systems, they have evolved to the present life form."
"I understood the biology lecture very well, but what exactly did you guys do with it?" Newton asked irritably.
Dyson went to the water fountain at the end of the room and poured himself a glass of water. Then he drank some water and came back with a glass in his hand.
"There are so many things I want to talk about, but let's move on.We decided to create nanomachine cells based on living cells. The parts are an information unit, which is DNA, and a protein unit, which is protein. First, We thought about what kind of protein unit we should make. n actual living things, carbon compounds are used as such. Because there are four covalent bonds, a virtually infinite variety of compounds are possible. But that's not interesting because it's the same thing. We had another option, so we decided to go for it. it's a silicon compound."
"Silicon Life?" Crane interjected.
"Yes, silicon also has four covalent bonds, and it is possible to create compounds as diverse as carbon compounds. The problem is that most of these compounds are hydrophobic, meaning they are not soluble in water. Therefore, it is no longer possible to fill cells with water and suspend molecules. This is because hydrophobic substances can only stick to each other. So, as for filling it with fats and oils, there is also a problem with that. This is because some compounds are hydrophilic. Therefore, we decided to fill the inside of the cell with air."
"Then how do you make the molecules stick together? Do they fly through the air?" Newton asked.
"Actually, this is not a drawback, but a great advantage. This is because, as you can see, the viscosity becomes large in the microscopic state. Even at the level of sperm, they can barely move through the water by waving their big tails. For the microscopic molecules in the aqueous solution of cells, water is nothing more than a hindrance to their movement. It is barely moving due to Brownian motion. This affects the metabolic rate of the cell."
"So if there is no water and there is only air or a vacuum, molecules will stick together quickly and metabolism will be faster?" Newton said.
"That's how it is. However, molecules cannot move at all in a vacuum alone. We need a medium that causes Brownian motion. We decided to use high frequency radio waves. A high-frequency generation unit is created separately, and of course, when cells divide, they are copied in the same way as DNA. Multiple high-frequency units are placed inside the cell, filling the cell with random high-frequency waves. This causes an effect similar to Brownian motion."
"Oh," Crane said, impressed.
"Of course, as a side effect, the temperature inside the cell rises to several hundred degrees, but fortunately silicon compounds are resistant to heat and do not decompose even at that temperature.On the contrary, the reaction rate increases. The rate of a chemical reaction doubles when the temperature increases by 10 degrees. 500 degrees is roughly 2 to the 50th power, or 10 to the 15th power."
"1000 trillion times!" Crane shouted.
"Actually, it won't go that far because there will be losses. The results we got are 100,000 times more."
"Wow!" Lee blurted out.
"One year passes in about 10 minutes, so one generation changes every 10 minutes."
"Wait, how did you design that silicon protein? Naturally, it would be a completely different group of compounds from current living cells, so did you actually design each one one by one?" Newton asked.
Dyson shook his head. "As you can see, of course that is impossible. We programmatically created an autonomously evolving model and used Genetic Programming to evolve it to the point where it could self-replicate. We created it in the computer and reproduced it in the real world. It took a long time, but we succeeded."
"What about DNA?" Newton asked.
"We created it separately. We created a stable filament made of a silicon compound and placed it in the nucleus inside the cell. However, I did not make it a double helix. If you use a double helix, you will have to open the helix each time you read, resulting in a considerable loss of metabolic time. When copying DNA during cell division, we made sure that a small amount of copying errors occur. Otherwise, it will not evolve."
"Why did you make DNA into threads? It would have been easier to read and write if it were a square chip." Newton asked.
Dyson waved the pen in his hand from side to side. "DNA doesn't function that simply inside cells. mRNA doesn't just read DNA. The filamentous DNA constantly interacts with substances floating within the cell. It can be activated or deactivated. Therefore, DNA must be in the form of threads. In the end, what we created is something like this: These are the DNA unit, high frequency unit, cell replication unit, silicon protein unit, silicon ribosome unit, and silicon mitochondria unit. The silicon protein unit is of course created by the silicon ribosomal unit. Now look at this."
As Dyson tapped the keyboard, another image appeared on the monitor. It was an image inside a cell. It looked a lot like the inside of a living cell they saw earlier. However, it was slightly different.
"The silicon ribosome is not that big Dharma shape, but something smaller and simpler. We decided to eliminate as much waste as possible. This ribosome is an optimal design from the beginning because it does not need to mutate during replication. Then, the exact same thing is duplicated using a belt conveyor method. In living cells, one ribosome in bacteria can only make about 20 proteins per second, but this silicon ribosome can make 2 million proteins. Of course, the video is delayed in time, but please consider that the actual speed is 100,000 times faster."
Yoshida and his fellows were fascinated by the inside of the artificial cells. Various forms of silicon proteins were synthesized, embedded in membranes, and took in and expelled substances floating inside cells. In reality, it was done 100,000 times faster.
"You said earlier that it's several hundred degrees inside the cell, but isn't that a problem? You can't even touch it." Newton said.
"Of course, we created a special cell wall to insulate the temperature. o you have any other questions?"
"What's the energy source? Cells use ATP, but how does this thing work?"
"It's all electric. It uses electromagnetic energy as its energy source. Of course, as in living cells, energy must be used to dispense each individual reaction. This silicon cell uses a nanobattery as its energy unit. We created a nano battery using the silicon mitochondria that I mentioned earlier, suspended a large amount of it inside the cell, and consumed it for each reaction. Of course, various silicon proteins assist in energy exchange."
"Where does that electricity come from? Can it be connected to an outlet from outside?"
"No, it's a plant, so of course it uses sunlight as its energy source. It's solar power. Real plants use chloroplasts to convert sunlight into ATP, but they only use two wavelengths of light: blue and red. Solar power generation can use light of almost any wavelength. From infrared to ultraviolet. Utilization efficiency will increase several times."
"If cells were created, how did you create multicellular plants from them?"
"First, we created various types of cells: connective tissue cells, epidermal cells, nutrient circulation cells, energy circulation cells, and so on. And We made some units out of them. The energy production unit is the leaf. Solar power is generated here. And the support unit, which is the stem or root. reproductive unit, which corresponds to a flower. We created several other units and used them to construct the whole."
Dyson tapped the keyboard and another image appeared. A very ordinary plant appeared. It had a stem, roots extending into the ground, and the stem branched out with oval leaves. At the top of the stem was a flower with six petals. Inside it were the stamens and pistils. However, this plant was not green, but completely black. Only the flowers were shining white. Yoshida and the others stared at the pitch-black plant on the monitor.
"There are flowers, but how do you get them pollinated? Is it self-pollination?" Newton said.
"Hmph," Dyson chuckled, the corners of his mouth curling up.
"No, it's cross-pollination. Otherwise, It will just create clones."
The image on the monitor has changed. It was a large bee. However, his entire body was pitch black. At first glance, it looked like a bee, but if you looked closely, you could see that the details were different. There were no thorns on its legs, and its body was flat with no markings or hair.
"This is a silicon bee that we developed to pollinate silicon plants.It was also created using nanotechnology. However, there is no need to evolve it, so it is simple. Although it copies and proliferates, it produces almost the same thing. However, I made it so that the size and shape of each individual part could be changed. These silicon bees carry pollen from silicon plants and pollinate them. They have primitive brains that are able to mutate to a certain extent to suit their environment. It's like an auxiliary unit for the silicon plant."
"Well, that's quite impressive. I'll praise you." Newton said, leaning back.
"I'm honored to hear you say that."
"I guess. I'll tell you, this is the first time I've praised someone else, including my previous life."
Yoshida and the others let out a sigh.
"Okay, that's all for now. After dinner, let's go outside and see for yourself."