Researchers at Rockefeller University in the US have made the first tentative steps towards creating a form of artificial life, BBC News Online said.
Their creations, small synthetic vesicles that can process (express) genes, resemble a crude kind of biological cell.
The parts for their "vesicle bioreactors", as they call them, all come from diverse realms of life.
The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli , stripped of all its genetic material.
This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.
When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.
A gene for green fluorescent protein taken from a species of jellyfish was the first they tried. The glow from the protein showed that the genes were being transcribed.
With a second gene, from the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus , the researchers got their cells to make small pores in their walls.
These let nutrients in from the surrounding "soup", so that the cells could function, in some instances, for several days.
Albert Libchaber, who heads the project, stresses that these bioreactors are not alive - they're performing simple chemical reactions that can also happen in cell-free biological fluids.
But the research is one strand in a new field called synthetic biology, where the aim is to re-design entire organisms, or recreate them from scratch.
The bio-entrepreneur Craig Venter, who headed the commercial venture to decode the human genome, is currently trying to strip a bacterium down to the minimum set of genes needed for survival.
Two years ago, another team showed that polio virus could assemble themselves from off-the-shelf chemical components mixed in a test-tube.
And several chemists are exploring the kinds of chemical reactions that may have preceded life.
Albert Libchaber's hope is to build up towards a minimal synthetic organism, with a designed cell wall, and a mixture of gene circuits that would let it maintain itself like a living cell.
As these constructs become more lifelike, the rest of us will have to start rethinking the nature of life.

The central part of the Tarantula Nebula, including the massive star cluster R136 (above center), stands out in this mosaic of Hubble Space Telescope images.

The biggest star-forming region in the local universe, the Tarantula Nebula also ranks among the most stunning sights astronomy.com said.
Northern Hemisphere skywatchers gush about the beauty of the Orion Nebula, a sight that warms observers' hearts during cold winter nights. Those who live in the Southern Hemisphere rave with even greater gusto about the intricate splendor of the Eta Carinae Nebula. Yet neither of these stellar nurseries, as spectacular as they are, come close to matching the Tarantula Nebula.
The Tarantula resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), an irregular satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. While the Orion and Eta Carinae nebulae are a couple of thousand light-years away, the Tarantula is a whopping 170,000 light-years distant.
Yet, despite its great range, the Tarantula glows brightly enough to be seen with the naked eye. Observers in the Southern Hemisphere can glimpse it on the outskirts of the LMC, in the southeastern corner of the constellation Doradus.
The massive complex spans 1,000 light-years, making it the biggest stellar nursery in the local universe. In fact, if this huge network of stars, gas, and dust replaced the Orion Nebula, it would cover a quarter of the sky and shine so dazzlingly you could see it in daylight.
One of the two recently released images shows the nebula's tangled central regions as seen by the Amateur astronomer Danny LaCrue recently sifted through this data and found that 15 exposures taken with the telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 could be combined into a dramatic mosaic.
LaCrue used the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator, which he downloaded from the Spacetelescope.org web site, to work with the format of Hubble's images.
The mosaic reveals wispy tendrils of gas and dust interlaced with hot, luminous stars. Just above the image's center lies R136, a rich cluster of stars that formed from the dense gas cloud. The cluster contains hundreds of stars, some up to 100 times as massive as the Sun and with surface temperatures 10 times the Sun's.
Prodigious amounts of ultraviolet radiation from these stars ionize the surrounding gas, causing it to glow. The brightest patches of nebulosity extending from the cluster somewhat resemble the legs of a spider, hence the nebula's name.
The entangled filaments on the nebula's outskirts more closely resemble a spider's cobweb. This was the target for astronomers using the 2.2-meter telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla, Chile. They took an image of the northeastern corner of the Tarantula that extends into the more barren areas just beyond.
The red color in the ESO image results from excited hydrogen atoms, and the green is emission from oxygen atoms that have lost two electrons. The radiation from the hot stars in R136, which lies beyond the lower-right corner of the image, knocks off those electrons. Because the intensity of radiation rises closer to the cluster, the color turns more yellow there.

Scientists studying depression say they have found a link between how well someone handles stress and how much good antidepressants do, psychport.com reported.
Psychiatrists have long known that about half the people found to be suffering from depression also show signs of elevated anxiety and researchers have been trying to explain the correlation.
In the new study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, doctors from Harvard and UCLA treated with drugs a group of 54 Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles who were both depressed and highly anxious.
They found that 60 percent of the group had a common genetic variant that helps govern the body's response to stress.
The researchers found that after being treated with antidepressants, patients with the genetic variation were far less anxious and depressed than when they began the study, said the lead author, Dr. Julio Licinio of the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of California.