Scientists Build SpudCell, the First Synthetic Cell With a Complete Life Cycle

Overview

Researchers at the University of Minnesota say they have built the first synthetic cell to complete an entire life cycle — feeding, growing, replicating its genome and dividing — using only purified, nonliving chemical components. The project, led by associate professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart and described in a new paper, is called SpudCell and “marks a major breakthrough in biological engineering,” according to Phys.org. “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life,” as the lab-made cell “grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle,” according to Quanta Magazine. Outside scientists have called the result a major technical achievement, but researchers not involved in the project, along with the team itself, say SpudCell is not yet alive.

What We Know

SpudCell is “assembled from the bottom up with purified, nonliving parts,” according to The Conversation. Those parts include “lipid molecules to create a cell-like membrane, DNA molecules to store genetic instructions, purified enzymes to copy and read those instructions, and other molecular machinery to help build proteins and other molecules from small chemical building blocks, such as amino acids and nucleotides,” the outlet reported. Each cell takes the form of a liposome — a hollow sphere of lipid molecules — holding rings of DNA called plasmids, according to STAT News. To read and copy that DNA, the team supplies the cells with 36 commercial enzymes for reading DNA and making proteins, according to Quanta Magazine.

SpudCell’s genome spans 90 kilobase pairs organized across seven separate DNA plasmids, according to Phys.org. That is smaller than what biologists had long assumed was the floor for a living cell: “Biologists had speculated that the genome for a living cell could be as small as 113 kbp in size. SpudCell’s genome is even smaller, at 90 kbp,” Phys.org reported.

The cells divide without a cytoskeleton. Instead, proteins crowd on the membrane surface until mechanical stress causes the membrane to split, according to Phys.org, a mechanism Quanta Magazine described as “protein tags that attracted crowding proteins to bend membranes.” The Conversation noted that division also still requires researchers to help it along by passing it through a sieve, underscoring how dependent the process remains on laboratory intervention.

The team also demonstrated a basic form of selection. After five generations, a faster-growing genetic variant with increased fusion-protein production outcompeted the original strain, with its advantage amplified under nutrient scarcity, according to Phys.org. Genetic fidelity across those generations was imperfect: after five generations, only 30% of the liposomes still carried the original DNA code, according to STAT News. The cells remain fully dependent on outside supplies — they must be fed “not just food but a key type of enzyme that is necessary for them to function,” with that food itself packaged inside other liposomes, STAT reported.

Adamala said the work represents a milestone for engineering biology from first principles. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell,” she said, adding, “This work is just the beginning. We are showing it’s possible to engineer the basic functions of the cell,” according to Phys.org. She called it “exceptionally difficult work to scale,” per the same report. Speaking to STAT News, Adamala described the underlying philosophy: “What we did is we built a cell-like system that is fully chemically defined, so there are no unknown building blocks in it, and it’s capable of doing things that people up until now used to think only natural living cells can do, and I think it’s important because we need to engineer biology,” according to STAT News. Explaining the project’s nickname to Quanta Magazine, Adamala framed it in terms of a leap rather than a finished product: “The modern cell is like a Dreamliner,” she said, referring to the Boeing 787 airplane. “We built a Wright flyer… the first bike frame with wings that flies 100 feet,” according to Quanta Magazine. Of the “SpudCell” name itself, she said, “I’m Polish, I’m mostly made of potatoes, so that’s fine with me,” per the same report.

Alongside the paper, Adamala and outside partners launched Biotic, described by Phys.org as “a public-benefit research and engineering institution that aims to build the shared technical infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering and to keep it open for the participation of researchers around the world.” STAT News reported that the group behind the work “started a public benefit corporation to share the technology with other scientists,” and identified Drew Endy as a co-founder of Biotic.

Scientists outside the project were largely impressed by the technical execution. Jack Szostak, who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research, called it “an impressive step,” adding, “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far,” according to Quanta Magazine. John Glass of the J. Craig Venter Institute said, “Combining all of these things is a staggering technical accomplishment. I think it will prove to be a watershed event for the synthetic-cell field and biology in general,” per the same report. Sijbren Otto of the Stratingh Institute in the Netherlands said, “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components… It’s not completely there yet, but it’s definitely getting quite close,” Quanta Magazine reported.

What We Don’t Know

Not every outside reaction was unreserved. Job Boekhoven of the Technical University of Munich said the division mechanism “beautifully demonstrates” the achievement but noted that “a clear demonstration of an evolutionary process is clearly something that’s missing,” according to Quanta Magazine. Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, called the work “a synthetic biology tour de force” but cautioned against over-hyping it, since the cells are not self-sustaining, Quanta Magazine reported.

Tara Deans, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the project, laid out why SpudCell falls short of qualifying as life in a piece for The Conversation. She wrote that the system “still relies on carefully controlled laboratory conditions and on researchers to supply its molecular machinery,” that it “doesn’t reliably pass on its genetic material or spontaneously evolve the way natural cells do,” and that it “cannot reproduce indefinitely outside a carefully controlled laboratory environment.” Measured against NASA’s definition of life — “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution” — Deans concluded SpudCell “is not yet autonomous life,” though she argued the work remains “scientifically valuable precisely because it exposes what is still missing to create life.”

The underlying paper has not completed peer review; Quanta Magazine reported it was posted as a preprint on bioRxiv on July 2, 2026. How reproducible the results are outside Adamala’s and Engelhart’s labs, what Biotic will ultimately share with other researchers, and whether the 30% genetic-fidelity rate STAT reported after five generations can be improved are not yet established in the sources available for this article.