Russian scientists are also working on creating an artificial cell, but they work rather with functional proteins, than the whole genome, research fellow from the Institute of General Genetics of Russian academy of sciences said.
      
      Recently American biologists put genome of one bacterium into cell wall of another relative bacterium, and their cell lived and functioned successfully. Russian scientists say that functional proteins allow coming closer to the secret of life, in other words to appearing of the very first cells.
      
      Working with proteins is an effective way to pick cells with required properties and much safer genetically, since no hereditary information would be passed.
      
      Source: ITAR-TAS