Interfacing Synthetic Cells with Biological Cells: An Application of the Synthetic Method

The “synthetic method” is the methodological approach that guides current scientific attempts of understanding natural processes by the construction of hardware, software, and/or wetware models from scracth. It focuses the scientific inquiry on the generative mechanisms of the target processes, with the goal of testing and improving scientific hypotheses about them. This article presents an application of the synthetic method based on cutting-edge technology: the construction of “synthetic cells” (also known as “artificial cells”) capable of exchanging chemical signals (and, in this sense, of ‘communicating’) with biological cells.