Researchers at the University of Minnesota said on July 1 they had built a cell-like system from purified, non-living chemicals that grows, copies its DNA, and splits in two. The team, led by associate professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart, calls it SpudCell. It is the first synthetic cell assembled from the bottom up, using individually purified components, to run a complete cell cycle. The researchers insist it is not alive. It cannot feed itself, cannot survive without constant outside help, and the work has not yet been peer-reviewed. The distinction matters: this is a genuine advance in engineering biology, not “life created in a lab.”
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SpudCell is a droplet wrapped in a lipid membrane, carrying a synthetic genome of roughly 90,000 base pairs spread across several DNA molecules and paired with 36 purified enzymes. That genome does not encode metabolism. SpudCell cannot make its own energy or protein-building machinery. So the team built “feeder” liposomes loaded with lipids, nutrients, enzymes, and ribosomes. SpudCell produces a membrane protein from its own DNA that locks onto those supply bubbles and fuses with them, dumping the cargo inside. Its DNA controls whether it feeds, how fast it grows, and how large it gets.
For division, the step that had stalled the field, the team skipped the internal scaffolding natural cells use. Instead, SpudCell studs its membrane with protein tags that pull other proteins in to crowd the surface, physically bending and pinching the droplet until it splits. The result copies itself for about five generations, though fidelity falls off quickly as the copies accumulate.
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Biologists had estimated a working genome could get no smaller than about 113,000 base pairs. SpudCell slips under that at roughly 90,000. The genome is compact because it offloads so much work — it does not need metabolic genes since its food and protein machinery are handed to it. That design sets it apart from the top-down approach used by the J. Craig Venter Institute, which strips a living bacterium down toward minimal genes. Building from scratch means researchers know the full ingredient list, making the system engineerable in a way a pared-down bacterium is not.
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By any standard scientific definition, the construct is not alive — and the researchers agree. In synthetic biology, a true artificial cell is generally defined as one that captures its own energy, holds macromolecules, stores information, and replicates. SpudCell fails the energy test outright. Cut off the deliveries and it stops. It also cannot yet truly evolve. The team induced variation by hand, engineering some droplets to grow larger, then watching those out-reproduce the rest under nutrient scarcity. That is directed change, not natural selection, because the variation did not arise on its own.