PM

The matter of cell or not might at this time be arbitrarily given by considering only familiar concepts of cell size for the containment unit. Is the flask not a “cell”?
Thus we are lead to consider that cell might instead be defined by aspects of “membrane” use, or extraneous use of unnecessary functions “secondary” to our prime use. The membrane structures of eukaryotic cells are complex indeed. With a range of different membrane systems in only one “cell”.

In essence what i am suggesting is that a synthetic biology of membrane creation be pursued.

It would be comparably ineffective, though, to host synthetic biology on such, as a 2d membrane has so much less space than a 3d solution. In a cell, the two are comparable because of the small scale, but on any larger scale a solution-based process will always have MUCH higher throughput than one that is surface-bound. Unless you create membranes with high surface area interspersed in solution, such as a colloid, or a bunch of cells. But then, we are talking about cell-free systems here, no?

I believe that a confident and active synthetic biology study is the prime gateway into understanding and conducting machine phase synthesis.
We will need synthetic biology systems to create the environments necessary for building the initial tools you wrote about which are the first step towards machine phase.

Here is my experiment that i propose, and the one which i most dearly wish to study.

Can we create artificial biological membranes of arbitrary dimension to hold within them the processes of synthetic biology? This would allow a framework via membrane interaction to localize specific processes and create mechanisms for “feeding” self assembly processes.

Basically, rather then using a “cell culture” to produce some molecule of interest, we have can create an “essentially continuous” membrane.