The Art of Fusion: A Synthetic Approach to Create Cross-Kingdom Hybrids

In his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas poetically notes in the context of cell fusion:

“There is a tendency for living things to join up…live inside each other..... In a way, it is the most unbiologic of all phenomena, violating the most fundamental myths of the last century, for it denies the importance of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things... It is a Chimera, a Griffon, a Sphinx, a Ganesha, a Peruvian God, a Ch'i-lin, an omen of good fortune.”

Cell fusion has been used historically to produce hybrid cell lines. More recently, in the context of synthetic biology, fusion between yeast and mammalian cells was used to transfer artificial chromosomes from one cell type to another¹. This type of cross-kingdom fusion, beyond its scientific merits, sharpens Thomas’ questions: how do multi-kingdom cell fusions challenge our categories and understandings of life? Where do they belong within both biological and cultural realms? How does their existence impact the environment and society? In this interdisciplinary collaboration between SymbioticA (University of Western Australia), the UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology/SynthSys (University of Edinburgh), we propose to create such entities using a synthetic approach, while exploring these questions through art. In the lab, human cells expressing viral proteins, previously shown to induce fusion between mammalian cell membranes², are mixed with yeast spheroplasts on a microfluidic imaging platform, in an attempt to record and publically present fusion events between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and HEK293 cells.

¹Brown et al. 2017. Nucleic Acids Res. 45(7):e50; ²Cachat et al. 2014. J Biol Eng. 8(1):26