For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-built-from-scratch-grows-and-divides-20260701/

by defrost • 21 days ago

957 293 21 days ago

quantamagazine.org

https://biotic.org/research/spudcell/

https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...

bensyverson• 21 days ago

“It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work.

That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can imagine?

TSiege2• 21 days ago

I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation

colordrops• 21 days ago

It seems that eventually you could build much more flexible and powerful if you build from scratch. Hacking existing cells is a shortcut but longer term we may get grey goo.

PaulHoule• 21 days ago

It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery.

Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!

This is more like it

https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...

but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"

senkora3• 21 days ago

It seems like this cell barely evolves, because the system they built for duplicating the DNA makes very few errors.

Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production.

For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...

arjie2• 21 days ago

Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.

“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”

Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.

dbingham2• 21 days ago

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

senkora3• 21 days ago

Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales.

Also known as the fallacy of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...

adrian_b2• 21 days ago

While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.

The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.

Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.

The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).

Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.

The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.

danans• 21 days ago

Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels

A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.

JumpCrisscross5• 21 days ago

That is the holy grail?

If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.

(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)

tialaramex• 21 days ago

To your aside: No, in this abstract sense Holy Grails are just a boon, a desirable piece of knowledge, achievement, that sort of thing.

fouc• 21 days ago

Have you not seen Jurassic Park?

0x1ceb00da• 21 days ago

Have you not seen big shark?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA

Legend2440• 21 days ago

Man, I am so tired of the cynicism around here.

Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.

yread• 21 days ago

I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots

hoppp3• 21 days ago

I think its more intended for manufacturing.

Custom metabolic pathways to manufacture materials could be more easily implemented with cells that are fully synthetic.

If the entire cell is synthetic its more easy to simulate it's full behavior and then it's faster to iterate on it during development.

dukeofdoom• 21 days ago

Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.

iwontberude• 21 days ago

I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.

mattlondon• 21 days ago

That is the holy grail?

At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.

We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.

That is absolutely fucking wild.

Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

What a time to be alive.

AndrewKemendo• 21 days ago

That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity

Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

kilobaud• 21 days ago

(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?

system33-• 21 days ago

Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”

You can’t win

yreg• 21 days ago

we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish

I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.

el_io2• 21 days ago

You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong.

We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.

So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.

tsunamifury2• 21 days ago

Wait you think creating life disapproves creationism?

I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…

namero9992• 21 days ago

I might in some sense agree with you but check your wording: creationism... we recreated life... see where I'm going?

graemep2• 21 days ago

Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

How does it affect religious ideas per se? its something many religious people long to find https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-a...

lo_zamoyski3• 21 days ago

Not really. AI isn't intelligent by any stretch. To make that claims requires ignorance of what constitutes "intelligence", especially the most essential element of intelligence, viz., intensionality. LLMs or expert system or whatever absolutely lack intensionality by definition because computation is by definition a purely syntactic process.

Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place

I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you use "religion" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).

we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth is the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)

wartywhoa232• 21 days ago

What a time to be alive.

May well turn into a time to better be dead.

hoppp3• 21 days ago

All we need is an at-home DNA printer and the world or life as we know it can be forever changed by a kid and an AI.

Its really easy now to engineer novel deadly viruses thanks to alphafold3

burnte2• 21 days ago

Interesting that this is led by the same Dr. Kate Adamala who ended the right-handed-proteins experiment a couple of years ago. Given how close she was I'm not surprised she's made this work.

dnautics3• 21 days ago

the left handed life thing is the only thing that makes me wonder about Adamala's judgement... there zero plausible mechanism for left handed life to succesfully compete.

in case you didn't know, your immune system WILL detect left handed pathogens, possibly more aggressively, and two of the body's mechanisms for fighting infection -- fever and ozonolysis -- are distinctly achiral

Arguably we should push for mirror life for industrial purposes FASTER because biocontrol is easier (they got nothing to eat) and lab escape is far less likely

gus_massa2• 21 days ago

I agree. Nitpicking:

(they got nothing to eat)

They can eat fats, that are not chiral.

Perhaps they can eat some carbohidrates, all carbohidrates are chiral, but some bacterias may eat some of the unusual carbohidrates too. But amino acids are beyond any possibility, and fixating nitrogen is hard, so I also think they will starve to death very fast.

scarmig• 21 days ago

Back then, it sounded like making right-handed life was decades away. But with this work, couldn't you just as easily make this kind of synthetic cell right-handed?

burnte2• 20 days ago

AFAIK she was saying we were years not decades away which is what made her nervous. We were very close and the risks hadn't been fully explored.

soraki_soladead• 21 days ago

This is awesome! Can someone in this field comment on the implications of sidestepping the cytoskeleton?

tom-villani• 21 days ago

Yes, this is definitely awesome.

In eukaryotic cells (your cells) the cytoskeleton is needed to shape the cell, position DNA, and most importantly for this study, separate daughter cells allowing replication. Think of the complexity here, you need to make compartments to separate the copies of the genetic material, physically separated during division. Microtubules assemble the "mitotic spindle" and then pulls the sister chromatids apart from each other. After the chromosomes separate, other cytoskeletal filaments (actin and myosin) form a contractile ring, which tightens to create a cleavage furrow. The membrane pinches inward until the cell splits in two.

Bacteria work slightly differently, since they don't have a eukaryotic cytoskeleton, but they do have cytoskeletal-like proteins (FtsZ), since they divide by building the cell wall inward (I am not an expert on bacteria lol).

SpudCell doesn't have a cytoskeleton, so instead it relies on a physical membrane-rupture strategy. It makes membrane proteins from its own DNA (a-hemolysin), which inserts into the membrane. They help fuse with feeder liposomes for growth. For division, these proteins crowd on the membrane surface, creating mechanical stress which leads to membrane instability, which then splits on its own.

willguest• 21 days ago

The complexity is certainly awesome, however there are all kinds of "free lunches" that we can take advantage of here, I'm paraphrasing (and glazing) Mike Levin here - when you work with biological systems, you are handling an agential material that naturally expresses itself.

I suspect that, once scientists lean more into the right kind of communication with these systems that many substantial leaps forward will be made. I am very excited about it too, mostly because I think it has the potential to positively impact how we see ourselves (humans) in the natural world.

red75prime2• 21 days ago

And the synthetic cell doesn't need to do anything about separating genetic material between daughter cells because it's just free-floating DNA that is likely to be in both parts. Right?

bellowsgulch2• 21 days ago

Somewhere here is a science fiction story that humanity is too inexperienced at synthetic biology to create sophisticated forms for manufacturing and have to result to the equivalent of bashing proteins together to make inferior biology to some future humans or other species.

twic• 21 days ago

Terrible, the cytoskeleton is the best bit of the cell!

(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)

hahahaa• 21 days ago

Randall - new XKCD idea just dropped

small_model• 21 days ago

The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!

JumpCrisscross5• 21 days ago

aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps

Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.

manIliketea• 21 days ago

I vastly prefer the explanation like of Roadside Picnic. They didn't try to create us, they don't care that we're here, and, ultimately, we will never be able to know them in any meaningful sense. ;)

aerodexis• 21 days ago

It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.

LogicFailsMe• 21 days ago

Just wait 'til he finds out the alien was Trelane and he just wanted more soldiers for his play army.

germandiago2• 21 days ago

I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...

kaizenite• 21 days ago

There is a whole movie about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1azwUwKrPo

r0m4n02• 21 days ago

Or another take, life isn't all that special if we can make it this easily.

We have always theorized the start of life but this could actively show that life could have started on a rock floating in space given enough time. No sky daddy and no aliens necessary!

r3trohack3r• 21 days ago

You’re use of “easy” might be being biased by living at the brink after 1000s of years of technology development by our ancestors.

JumpCrisscross5• 21 days ago

“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.

So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton. One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper (opens a new tab). By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky (opens a new tab) at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries, it worked.“

This is the novel bit.

ezst• 21 days ago

(opens a new tab)

khriss• 21 days ago

Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?

dnautics3• 21 days ago

without criticising the work (its very cool and a very important first step) they haven't figured out division yet, which is kind of important.

IAmBroom3• 21 days ago

Lots of missing steps before it is "created life". Which the researchers admit in the very start.

SwtCyber2• 21 days ago

The interesting bit is that they didn't solve division by rebuilding the whole cytoskeleton, they sort of sidestepped it

mghackerlady• 21 days ago

I wonder if these principles could be applied to non-organic components. I imagine a completely synthetic robo-cell would raise interesting questions.

Also, go MN!

HanClinto• 21 days ago

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"

bell-cot• 21 days ago

"And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]

codemax98• 21 days ago

I love exciting scientific news like this

joh6nn• 21 days ago

For the love of all things holy, can we not do these kinds of experiments on the same planet we live on?

dyauspitr2• 21 days ago

Oh shut up, can we get some frontier stuff going without some doom and gloom. All this knowledge for all these years and next to no progress.

snapcaster• 21 days ago

I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?

qsera• 21 days ago

why can't they be positive?

Because no one minds if good things happen...

JanJedryszek4• 21 days ago

humanfromearth9• 21 days ago

I wonder what animal or plant would grow out of that...

JumpCrisscross5• 21 days ago

Neither. This is a single cell.

Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.

quux• 21 days ago

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038

deadbabe2• 21 days ago

Going by people’s reactions to AI, what will our reactions be to artificial humans generated from these methods?

Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.

vhantz• 21 days ago

From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.

Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.

deadbabe2• 21 days ago

Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.

We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.

Imustaskforhelp• 21 days ago

This is so cool! I had once gone in the rabbit-hole of finding artificial life and there were experiments which did multiple phases but none which did the whole thing and I was left wondering why. I am a bit happy to see that someone was working on it (and succeeded!)

There is another submission on Hackernews which talks about: The first early human eggs from stem cells[0] which is an interesting discussion to read through on hackernews as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742483

october8140• 21 days ago

This is really cool. But I dislike the dialog where because step 1 happened people talk like steps 2-100 are not inevitable.

oytis• 21 days ago

Uh-oh

germandiago2• 21 days ago

That is closer to consciousness than AI will ever be. :)

red75prime2• 21 days ago

Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)

namero9992• 21 days ago

Definitely. An implication of several strands of idealism is that we will be able to create artificial life (with consciousness)... it will just look like biology.

JanJedryszek4• 21 days ago

yes

merksittich• 21 days ago

Science News has a more balanced take, with additional quotes from peers.

Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology. She then sent the 190-page manuscript to journalists, under embargo, even before she had uploaded it to the preprint server bioRxiv, where her colleagues could read and assess it. She says her group will submit it to a new journal soon. “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.

https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...

oliverx05• 21 days ago

Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology

cogman10• 21 days ago

Well of course, it doesn't have a soul. /s

Yeah, I have a hard time reconciling this especially since biology and biologic research often involves things like enzymes which both aren't alive and are synthetically created.

I'm certain cell magazine has published articles on novel enzyme discovery.

Aachen• 21 days ago

Exoplanets also aren't planets. Some things just seem to have definitions with a history that get applied to new discoveries that don't fall within the definition. Distinguishing random rocks in space from planets was done by requiring planets to orbit around the sun, and so planets elsewhere cannot be called planets no matter that it's 1:1 the same thing. Biology probably has a similar history of trying to draw a line somewhere between what was created and what evolved to be part of the 'natural' world

ranger_danger2• 21 days ago

Not defending anyone but it's quite common for people to hold different definitions of words with some unknown presumed context in mind that others don't see in the moment. I'd argue it's the single biggest reason for all arguments in recent human history.

cperciva4• 21 days ago

My paper demonstrating a side channel attack on RSA via hyperthreading was rejected from the crypto preprint archive on the basis that it was "not cryptography".

(Reviewers at J.Crypto subsequently sat on it for a year and then suggested I submit it to a journal on CPU microarchitecture instead.)

Novel research is uniquely susceptible to "cool but it's not part of our field", because that critique is entirely correct until the research gets published!

svnt• 21 days ago

It's because really what they are doing is using chemistry to split a cell. Adamala is a chemist.

They have just bolted an unsynchronized physicochemical process onto the boundary of the cell. It doesn't coordinate with anything to do with the cell. Both cells don't get half of the dna. They built stochastic chemical scissors that only work if you make the cell less cell-like.

bouchard3• 21 days ago

“It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.

That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.

vintagedave• 21 days ago

In fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.

noosphr• 21 days ago

It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons.

I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was.

The only people who think peer review still works are people who have never used it or people who have never had a novel idea in their lives.

twothreeone2• 21 days ago

The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.

TL;DR politics breaks everything.

Maxion• 21 days ago

My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!

jrflo• 21 days ago

Yeah, the scientific review process is extremely weird. I've had several papers published and the responses you get from reviews is sometimes complete nonsense. Sometimes it feels like some reviewers do little more than skim your paper or get a power trip off of rejecting people. Lots of politics and people trying to reject ideas that are counter to the ones their own labs are pushing. I don't blame the authors for expecting to get push back from their work, many breakthroughs are usually met with resistance from the status quo.

tstactplsignore• 21 days ago

The extremely obvious solution to this is just to preprint your own work before submitting it to a journal?

This has become the norm in science, and all of the best labs do it now, except for a few toxic holdouts who incorrectly believe preprinting their work will adversely impact its peer review.

benwen• 21 days ago

Obligatory reference to Kuhn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

cmiles74• 21 days ago

I thought the NY Times article was pretty good, they had some nice illustrations.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...

abrookewood• 21 days ago

That is way more comprehensible for me at least.

azan_• 21 days ago

The usual way of doing things is completely broken system.

Gooblebrai• 21 days ago

It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University

Can't blame her if she wants her line of research to stay alive

srean2• 21 days ago

Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.

DesiLurker• 21 days ago

let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)

dehrmann• 21 days ago

There are multiple FDA-approved lab-grown meats on the market. You can literally go to a handful of restaurants and order lab-grown meat today. The production process is just expensive and it's getting scaled out.

srean2• 21 days ago

Yes. It's still quite a distance away from a feel and taste of meat. At least the affordable ones.

adrianN• 21 days ago

Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.

1-6• 21 days ago

"The cell is not alive by any definition..." "But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife."

Contradicting themself in the same paragraph.

tsunamifury2• 21 days ago

The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.

Tenoke• 21 days ago

This is great, I assumed we were getting close (and not quite there), so it's great to see the progress. The path from here to building a single-celled organism out of nonlive materials looks very straight.

oliverx05• 21 days ago

If anyone is interested in the actual manuscript, here it is: https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/spudcell-manuscript...

ahmedfromtunis3• 21 days ago

You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race.

Instead, your learn about Biotic.

It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084.

Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a relic.

For productive matters, Biotec preferes to rely on its biomachines. Imagine drones giving birth to offspring when traffic is at a peak. It takes more energy, sure. But no factory, nor workers are needed.

If left alone, machines would multiply out of control, instead of rotting to waste like in the olden days.

xpct2• 21 days ago

Interesting thought experiment, but I don't see why automating machines that build and repair other machines wouldn't be sufficient. At the limit, such a machine would be able to repair itself, or repair other long-running machines. I imagine it would come down to wear and efficiency loss.

ahmedfromtunis3• 21 days ago

Manufacturing requires micromanaging every aspect of the process, requiring special machinery, trained workforce (human or not), inventory management.

Reproduction, once we master its blueprint of course, is much less demanding: just provide the ingredients at approximate proportions and the chemistry will work its magic to provide a similar enough unit to achieve the required task.

boogieknite• 21 days ago

I'm not too well read so Mars Express is the first fiction where I came across these themes. Highly recommend. When I watched it 18 months ago I didn't realize real development was ongoing in these scifi-seeming fields

ahmedfromtunis3• 21 days ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm trying to get myself to watch more movies and this looks like the perfect one for a cosy weekend.

And yes, science it seems is advancing faster than we might be aware of.

dyauspitr2• 21 days ago

Humans have the power to self reproduce though. I don’t believe anything short of an engineered disease could wipe out all of humanity at this point and it has to happen soon before we figure out how to fix all of our problems using genetic engineering.

PowerElectronix• 21 days ago

To note, we are already solving our problems through genetic engineering... Only one generation at a time.

jibal8• 21 days ago

A high enough wet bulb temperature can wipe out all of humanity.

Terr_• 21 days ago

You stumble across another article from 2226: It describes how the Earth was consumed by a grey-goo apocalypse of nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, so that no pore of its surface is untouched by reservoirs of rogue units, all of which are in a constant arms-race of development and combat. Some have formed groups that construct colossal moving megastructures piloted by inscrutable hive-minds.

The article notes that this event actually occurred ~3.5 billion years ago, and suggests that the current hive-mind should buy a subscription.

vanderZwan• 21 days ago

The hive-mind reads another history article about how self destructive the various meta-hive-minds acted over the last centuries. While the critical self-reflection is justified, it thinks the non-hivemind versions weren't much better at first, stuck in a cycle of repeatedly nearly exterminating themselves with their own wasteful toxic oxygen for 800 million years, until some of them figured out how to use it for something.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130124200735/https://www.pathe...

somelamer567• 21 days ago

So what is being described here? Scratch-built self-replicating nano-machines inspired by biology? That itself seems significant.

netfortius• 21 days ago

Reminded me of Maturana and his autopoiesis.

blorbthrow• 21 days ago

'Unlike living natural cells... the synthetic SpudCell can't survive and replicate without feeding on external food and ribosomes'

So in the future when there's a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of SpudCellular Biology, the SpudCells will devour all biological life they can in order to harvest the building blocks they need. "Just social distance and wear two masks," the Surgeon General tells the CNN correspondent, as he disolves to red gray goo on live TV.

Animats• 21 days ago

Craig Venter wanted to do this. But he died earlier this year.

catigula• 21 days ago

For some reason, research like this has a much more apocalyptic feeling than it has in the past.

amai• 21 days ago

The wikipedia website to "It's alive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Alive) lists mostly horror movies. So I'm not sure this is good news.

petcat• 21 days ago

The people behind it:

https://biotic.org/

Biotic is a public-benefit nonprofit research organization developing chemically and functionally defined synthetic cells. Biotic's mission is to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering. Our goal is to ensure that all people and the planet benefit from world‑leading biotechnologies soon enough to matter. We conduct and support public‑benefit research ranging from foundational science to how people interact with biotechnology.

It looks like this particular research is conducted at the University of Minnesota

krunck• 21 days ago

Everything they are doing is dual use. Thus I don't feel the benefit.

thejokeisonme• 21 days ago

If you read a bit you learn that it's not a cell. Bad title imo.

kadomony• 21 days ago

This is literally how Cell was made. Cell Saga, here we go.

commieneko3• 21 days ago

Interesting. I pasted the article URL into Claude Opus 4.8, along with some questions about uses for cells that couldn't reproduce and Claude thought about it for a while, and then got murdered by the guardrails. I was invited to edit the question and try again; in a different chat. Or use a dumber model.

I suppose I can see why. But at the time I was just curious about the idea of "mule" cells.

whycome• 21 days ago

What are the guardrails here?

commieneko3• 21 days ago

I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.

IshKebab2• 21 days ago

They're paranoid about people using AI to synthesise anthrax or something. You also can't ask it how to build a nuclear bomb.

bradley13• 21 days ago

Which shows why guardrails on AI are just dumb. What harm could come from answering your question? None.

dist-epoch• 21 days ago

Red blood cells can't reproduce and are "mule" cells - bags of hemoglobin. They are not really alive, so maybe not exactly what you were thinking of.

dizhn• 21 days ago

Layman question. How can they determine that the cell divided in a reproducing/growing fashion rather than due to mechanical or other external means because of the methodology they used to trigger the act of breaking up? Or does it not matter in living cells either?

ChrisArchitect• 21 days ago

NYT piece with visualizations:

This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. and It's Manmade

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038)

bomewish• 21 days ago

The “from scratch” is doing a lot of work here!

FloorEgg2• 21 days ago

I don't think I had ever heard the phrase "x is doing a lot of work here" until about a year ago, from Claude, which seems to say it's lot.

Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it?

Are you Claude?

Or just a coincidence?

zchrykng• 21 days ago

It is a common phrase and has been for a very long time though has increased over the last 6 years or so.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...

tete2• 21 days ago

"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.

jibal8• 21 days ago

It's an ancient phrase.

jfengel• 21 days ago

It's a common enough expression. It has an entry in Wiktionary (sense 2):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_a_lot_of_work

A random example from 1991:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Object_oriented_Program...

Of course Claude picked it up from usage; it didn't invent the phrase. But I don't see any indication that it's uniquely Claude-y. I use the phrase on occasion myself.

akomtu• 21 days ago

Scientists seem really busy these days creating synthetic life: advances in AI, human eggs from stem cells and now this - synthetic cells. I somehow feel they are inspired by the Alien movies.

wartywhoa232• 21 days ago

They are inspired by transhumanist agenda and corresponding VC backing.

JanJedryszek4• 21 days ago

I;m one of the co-founders, AMA :)

nashashmi2• 21 days ago

What are the implications for nanobots with this kind of innovation: Artificial cell division recreating itself in 2? Is this a future endeavor of this tech?

JanJedryszek4• 21 days ago

Great question - what we built isn't a "nanobot" in the Drexlerian sense (a tiny engineered machine assembling things atom by atom). It's a cell, it runs onn molecular machines like ribosomes, membranes, and enzymes. The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing, not from a mechanical device building a second copy of itself. So on your specific question: division is very much a core goal of the synthetic cell field, and getting a built-from-defined-parts system to grow and divide reliably on its own is one of the big open problems ahead of us. What SpudCell demonstrates is assembling something cell-like from well-defined components. Where this does connect to the "programmable matter" dream is that if you can engineer a cell from the ground up, you can in principle program what it makes and does, using biology's own manufacturing stack rather than trying to invent a mechanical one from scratch. That's a slower and messier path than the sci-fi version, but it's the one that actually runs on physics we think we understand.. hope it makes sense!

Kotlopou• 21 days ago

Hi, thanks, and very cool work (assuming it eventually holds up in peer review)!

A few things that confused me while trying to read the paper:

- There's two different methods of cell division mentioned -- mechanical extrusion and the autonomous, protein-driven division. Most of the results (e.g. the five generations) focus on the mechanically driven one, while the autonomous one is more "lifelike". Does the autonomous division have a higher failure rate, or can you get the same results with it as well?

- It's mentioned that the bottleneck for survival of many generations is ribozomes degrading, but also that ribozomes are supplied from the outside. Do the degraded ribozomes actively harm the cell? Or is there some other reason why they cannot be replenished?

- You say that after 5 generations, only 30% of the cells have the correct genome, and it's presented like a problem -- but 30% of 2^5 is more than 10, so this sounds like more than enough for continued survival. Is there something missing in this train of thought? Perhaps other failures that can kill the cell?

And some questions about the implications:

- Do you think that the genome you use is already close to minimal? AFAIK a lot of the minimal organisms found in the wild are parasites of some sort, getting most of their complex molecules from the outside, which is a similar spirit to this (a rich medium and the cell "just" self-duplicating). If the multiple plasmids are causing trouble (per the previous point), would it make sense to try and get rid of some of them?

- Are those minimal genes somehow interpretable -- as in "you need functions X, Y, and Z and cannot avoid them by using a better medium"?

- Do you think this is a plausible stage of very early life?

userulluipeste2• 21 days ago

The current model, of a cell that cannot live on its own and cannot evolve (being too far from "edge of chaos") is what will be most useful for bio-engineering. Yes, we need the mechanism for creating cells, and the newfound division for a minimum viable cell is paramount. But, we also need for ways to control its reproduction, be it as to die out on its own after few generations due to degraded protein build-up, or (in the best case scenario) due to some other built in mechanism. Otherwise, expect (at least) some amount of scaremongering, about playing fast and loose with things that may get out of hand. The best thing is to have this kind of cell template that could somehow be augmented with whatever additional plug-in functionality (useful for us, case by case) and then get it produced in the needed quantities and not more. The research direction that makes sense is for ways to add such "mission specific" functions to this synthetic cell and ways to create the first generation as efficiently as possible, at large scale. That's it.

stevenalowe• 21 days ago

Is it edible? If not, why not?

nextaccountic• 20 days ago

If you get it to divide by itself, and it gets leaked, can it exist as a new species indefinitely?

Something like, all forms of life share a common ancestor.. until now

jonahss• 21 days ago

I love how this article reads similarly to articles about recent advances in the Conway's Game of Life community.

From my point of view: a team combined all the tricks in the community into one machine and we finally created a new life form to play with!

maxprimes• 21 days ago

I look forward to never hearing about this ever again.

caycep• 21 days ago

this is how Sekiguchi Genetics got started. Or maybe Weyland Yutani Corporation

galaxyLogic• 21 days ago

Frankenstein!

greazy• 21 days ago

It appears the scientists or someone close to them have created a wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpudCell

I don't think I've ever seen researchers do PR like this directly. Interesting approach, will it become the norm?

sciencejerk• 21 days ago

Or, as Adamala put it: “What else can biology do?”

Oh I dunno, maybe create synthetic organisms capable of rapidly destroying all life?

chubs• 21 days ago

Layman, so bear with me. I'm wondering where they got the amino acids and proteins from? I was under the impressino that cells needed them to be "homochiral" to function, and the artificial 'built from scratch' amino acids are 50:50 of each chirality. In my reading of the NYTimes simplification of this story they mention that the genes were "borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli". Mainly just curious how far they managed to get to the 'from scratch' goal. Or is what they've done a bit more of an assembly of bits and pieces? Cheers all.

yehosef• 21 days ago

I'll be impressed when they can create an entire cell from scratch and it will start to divide. They can create all the needed precursors, bypassing millions of years of random permutation. Because until you have an entire working cell with replication, you have no retained benefit.

Masho_17• 21 days ago

se penso ad una cosa del genere mi vengono totalmente i brividi

SwtCyber2• 21 days ago

"Not alive, but doing a suspicious number of alive-looking things" is a pretty good summary of why this is cool

localdeclan• 20 days ago

I wouldn’t really consider this creating life, but this is the first step into something extremely cool for sure. Love topics like this

keepupnow• 20 days ago

I could have told them that this would work, it's pretty obvious!

DrScientist• 20 days ago

With these kind of 'demonstrations', the key question is what have we learnt as a result?

Not sure what that is in this case.

For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

Related Stories