Comment by chubs

Layman, so bear with me. I'm wondering where they got the amino acids and proteins from? I was under the impressino that cells needed them to be "homochiral" to function, and the artificial 'built from scratch' amino acids are 50:50 of each chirality. In my reading of the NYTimes simplification of this story they mention that the genes were "borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli". Mainly just curious how far they managed to get to the 'from scratch' goal. Or is what they've done a bit more of an assembly of bits and pieces? Cheers all.