To construct a synthetic cell we need to understand the rules that
permit life. A central idea in modern biology is that in addition to
the four entities making reality, matter, energy, space and time, a fifth
one, information, plays a central role. As a consequence of this central
importance of the management of information, the bacterial cell is
organised as a Turing machine, where the machine, with its compartments
defining an inside and an outside and its metabolism, reads and
expresses the genetic program carried by the genome. This highly
abstract organisation is implemented using concrete objects and dynamics,
and this is at the cost of repeated incompatibilities (frustration),
which need to be sorted out by appropriate «patches». After describing
the organisation of the genome into the paleome (sustaining and propagating
life) and the cenome (permitting life in context), we describe
some chemical hurdles that the cell as to cope with, ending with the
specific case of the methionine salvage pathwa
