‘Almost Alive’: Scientists Built an Artificial Cell-Like Blob From Scratch. It Eats, Grows, and Divides

SpudCell blurs the line between chemistry and life, but it is not life yet.

A tiny blob in a dish has pushed one of biology’s oldest questions into new territory: When does inanimate chemistry become life?

Researchers at the University of Minnesota say they have built a synthetic cell-like system, called SpudCell, from non-living chemical parts. It can take in nutrients, grow, copy its genetic material, divide and show a crude form of competition across generations. The work, released as a preprint before peer review, does not mean scientists have created life. The SpudCell is not ‘alive’ in the classical sense, although the definition for what constitutes life gets blurrier with each such biotech breakthrough.

What these findings suggest more clearly, on the other hand, is that scientists can now assemble some or many of life’s basic functions without starting from a living organism.

Synthetic biology has long sought more controllable cells to use them as microscopic factories that could one day help make medicines, materials, foods or fuels. Until now, most “synthetic” cells began with life already in hand. Previously, scientists had stripped down bacteria or replaced parts of their genomes. SpudCell takes a more radical route. It starts with a purified protein system, DNA, and a fatty membrane, and other molecular tools, whose final assembly does remarkably life-like acts.

“We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell,” said Kate Adamala, the University of Minnesota synthetic biologist who led the work. “It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

A Cell Built, Not Born

SpudCell is not something like a bacterium. It is closer to a carefully stocked bubble: a liposome, or tiny sphere made from fatty molecules, containing synthetic DNA and a protein-making system. Its genome is only about 90,000 base pairs, far smaller than the genome of a typical bacterium and microscopic compared with the human genome. The genetic instructions sit across separate DNA plasmids, which makes the system modular but also fragile.

To grow, SpudCell fuses with smaller “feeder” liposomes that deliver lipids, enzymes, ribosomes and other supplies. In living cells, ribosomes build proteins. SpudCell still cannot make its own ribosomes, so researchers must provide them. The fact this synthetic cell cannot build its own ribosomes is one of the reasons the researchers at the University of Minnesota are careful not to call it fully alive.

But for some biotech use cases, SpudCells may be better at what they do than biological living cells.

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“I know the full ingredient list of the cell, I know exactly what chemicals, what molecules at what concentrations,” Adamala told CNN. “It is fully defined, which means we can engineer it.”

Natural cells are astonishingly useful, but they are also the products of billions of years of evolution. That makes them very complicated, and a lot of times you don’t need all that biological baggage to do what you want to achieve. A cell assembled from known parts could become easier to model, debug and redesign.

The system also solves a long-standing problem in bottom-up synthetic biology: cell division. Natural cells often use internal scaffolding to split. SpudCell does not. Instead, proteins crowd together on the membrane until mechanical stress helps the structure divide. Cells engineered to make more of that surface protein divided more efficiently and outcompeted others after several generations.

The Long Road to Artificial Life

Scientists have tried to mimic cells starting from scratch in the lab for decades. In 1957, Thomas Ming Swi Chang created the first early “artificial cells,” more like useful capsules than living systems, a line of work that later influenced drug delivery and blood-substitute research.

In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute reported a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome. But that cell still relied on a living bacterial backbone to run the genome.

In 2016, the same institute announced JCVI-syn3.0, a minimal bacterial cell with 473 genes and about 531,000 base pairs — the smallest genome then known for a self-replicating organism grown in laboratory media. Yet it, too, came from a pared-down natural cell.

SpudCell is different because it was built bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components.

“It is not as robust, as fast, or as good at most of its functions as a natural cell,” Adamala told The Guardian, “but it is proof of principle that molecules can reconstitute behaviours that up until now we only associated with natural living cells.”

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Why This Is Still Far From Life

SpudCell survives only under laboratory conditions. Researchers must keep it fed, stocked with borrowed molecular machinery and held under controlled conditions. It divides slowly — roughly once every 12 hours — while E. coli can divide in about half an hour under good conditions.

It also makes mistakes. When SpudCells divide, they do not reliably pass the full genetic set to daughter cells. After several generations, lineages fail and the Spudcell populations collapse entirely. The system cannot manage its own metabolism, clear waste or rebuild the protein-making machinery that keeps it going.

Drew Endy, a Stanford bioengineer and co-founder with Adamala of the public-benefit institution Biotic, was cautious about whether these synthetic cells constitute life as we know it. “I don’t think she’s created life,” he told CNN.

Those limitations are also a safety valve. Biosecurity experts do not see an immediate threat from SpudCell-like systems, because they remain too dependent on controlled external factors.

“The current SpudCell is an exciting proof-of-principle, but before it can be used for good or for bad, it will require significantly more work,” said Becky Mackelprang, director of security programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, according to The New York Times.

The next challenge is clear. Spudcell 2.0 needs to build ribosomes from genetic instructions, improve genome inheritance and reduce the cell’s dependence on feeder liposomes. If scientists can do that, SpudCell may become less like a biochemical stunt and more like a true engineering platform. And who knows what follows from there.

For now, it is neither ordinary chemistry nor ordinary life. It is something in between: a handmade system that forces biology to show its working.