Talk:Artificial cell

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Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 00:34, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

This page is a pretty big mess! I'm not a very experienced Wikipedia writer, but I will try to fix a few things. I thought I should make an entry here first and of course any help is welcome.

Here a couple of things I don't like:

-The most important section might be the "synthetic cell" section at the bottom of the page, which kind of tries to describe in more detail what a synthetic cell can be and what the different approaches are, e.g. top-down vs. bottom-up. It is probably very important to distinguish between "top-down" and "bottom-up" much earlier in the article, instead of only here, because the article switches back and forth between these very different approaches pretty often. This "synthetic cell" section itself is pretty messy and alternates between bottom-up and top-down within the section (which I already tried to fix). Generally it needs a lot of improvement. It also probably doesn't make sense to have the section named "synthetic cell", which is a synonym for "artificial cell" (title of the article).

-The "Materials" section states that a synthetic cell can be made from all kinds of different materials, but the rest of the article pretty much disregards that fact. Particularly the "Preparation" section lists an array of methods and does not even state which type (from which material) of artificial cell these generate.

-In science there is no clear definition of what qualifies as an artificial cell, and there are many different approaches (e.g. top-down vs bottom-up); therefore, the article should probably try to stay clear of any claims of first time achievements. E.g. already in the introduction (second paragraph) there is an inappropriate example of an 'almost living artificial cell'. This also is particularly an issue in the "History" section, with many "first time" examples and year dates. Just as an example among many of similar issues: The section describes the "creation of an artificial cell membrane" in 2011. However, in many ways a simple liposome could be seen as an artificial cell membrane and those have been around fo >50 years. I supposed those examples don't need to all be deleted, but maybe the section should be called "examples" and divided into different approaches or even materials, instead of providing a unified history of artificial cells in general.