  The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured
by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary
approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our
understanding of living systems. Here we point out the synergies between these
fields, especially between bottom-up synthetic biology and origin of life
research. We explore recent progress made in artificial cell compartmentation
in line with the crowded cell, its metabolism, as well as cycles of growth and
division, and how those efforts are starting to be combined. Though the
complexity of current life is among its most striking characteristics, none of
life's essential features require it, and they are unlikely to have emerged
thus complex from the beginning. Rather than recovering the one true origin
lost in time, current research converges towards reproducing the emergence of
minimal life, by teasing out how complexity and evolution may arise from a set
of essential components.
