Minnesota Lab Builds a Synthetic Cell That Grows and Divides

One peer reviewer who looked at the manuscript behind SpudCell had a blunt verdict, according to a report on the work: this "is not real biology." The scientists who built it don't entirely disagree, and that tension is most of what makes the story worth telling.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences, led by associate professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart, say they have assembled a synthetic cell called SpudCell entirely from non-living chemical parts, with no borrowed bacteria and no living template, that can feed, replicate its DNA, divide and pass a genetic advantage to its offspring. The work was described by the university as a synthetic cell with a complete life cycle, and it was posted this week as a preprint through Biotic, a research nonprofit Adamala co-founded. It has not yet been peer-reviewed.

SpudCell is not alive by any conventional definition, and the team is careful to say so. It cannot survive outside carefully controlled lab conditions. It needs externally supplied nutrients and specialized components to grow, and it depends on ribosomes purified from E. coli bacteria to manufacture proteins. After five generations, only about 30% of daughter cells inherited the complete synthetic genome, a defect rate that would kill most organisms outright.

What it can do is narrower, and more interesting to synthetic biologists, than "artificial life" headlines suggest. The genome runs to 90,000 base pairs, split across seven separate DNA plasmids rather than one chromosome. That's smaller than the 113,000 base pairs many biologists had assumed was the practical floor for a working cell. A human genome, for comparison, runs to roughly 3 million kilobase pairs. Unlike a living cell, SpudCell doesn't hold its shape with a cytoskeleton, the internal scaffolding real cells use to divide. Instead, proteins crowd onto the membrane's surface until mechanical stress splits it in two, a workaround the team says sidesteps one of synthetic biology's oldest bottlenecks.

The researchers also ran a basic selection experiment. They introduced a genetic change that boosted production of the membrane-splitting fusion protein; the faster-growing variant outcompeted the original within five generations, and the advantage grew larger when nutrients were scarce. That's natural selection, in miniature, inside a system that had no ancestry and no biology behind it a year ago.

"We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark."

Kate Adamala, University of Minnesota

Post by @UMNews

Adamala says the framing is deliberate. Scaling the work took flying collaborators in for hands-on demonstrations just to transfer lab technique between teams, workable for one manuscript but not for an industry. That's why she and outside partners are launching Biotic, a public-benefit institute meant to standardize synthetic-cell engineering the way open protocols standardized other fields, rather than leaving the technique locked inside one lab's know-how.

"This was exceptionally difficult work to scale," she said. "Any engineering discipline needs modularity. In our case, we believe those modules must be built in the open: an infrastructure foundation built privately just gives someone a toll booth."

The team's own paper flags the obvious follow-on question: what happens when synthetic cells get better at this? Adamala and her co-authors wrote that increasingly capable systems highlight the need for a safety and security framework for future synthetic-cell engineering, a caveat aimed at regulators as much as at competing labs and not a red flag on SpudCell itself. In its current, dependency-riddled form, the team says, it poses no containment risk.

Whether SpudCell becomes a founding document of synthetic biology or a clever, narrow lab trick depends on what happens after peer review, and after other labs try to reproduce it without Adamala's team flying in to help. For now, it feeds. It divides. And it does both without ever having been alive.