A team at the University of Minnesota has constructed a synthetic cell from off-the-shelf chemical components that can feed, grow, copy its genetic instructions, and divide for five to ten generations. The work, described in a preprint not yet accepted by a peer-reviewed journal, marks the first time a cell built entirely from non-living molecules has completed multiple life-cycle rounds, including a form of selection in which a genetic modification that boosted growth allowed a variant to outcompete the original. The cell, named SpudCell, contains a defined genome of about 90,000 base pairs across seven DNA plasmids and a few hundred types of proteins and small molecules, making it far simpler than any natural organism.

The mechanism sidesteps a long-standing obstacle in synthetic biology. Natural cells divide using an internal cytoskeleton, a complex protein scaffold that has been difficult to engineer from scratch. SpudCell instead produces proteins that crowd the inner membrane surface until mechanical stress forces the compartment to split. The cell imports nutrients and uses ribosomes taken from E. coli to translate its genes, but it cannot yet manufacture its own ribosomes. Because those borrowed ribosomes degrade, each lineage dies out after five to ten generations. The genome is also fragmented, so genetic information is not reliably passed intact to daughter cells.

Viewed from the United States, the project is led by synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, who has launched a public-interest initiative called Biotic to standardise the platform and allow other laboratories to reproduce and extend the work. UK-based researchers not involved in the study, such as Yuval Elani of Imperial College London, described the result as a genuine advance in the long-running effort to organise chemistry into life-like behaviour. John Glass of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a leading centre for minimal-cell research, said the Minnesota cell is closer to being “alive” than any previous bottom-up construction. The team itself stops short of calling SpudCell a living organism, emphasising that it is an engineered approximation that reproduces core cellular behaviours while remaining dependent on external molecular machinery.

The next concrete milestone is the submission of the manuscript for formal peer review, which Adamala says is imminent. Beyond that, the Biotic consortium aims to consolidate the cell’s seven DNA molecules into a single stable genome and to engineer the capacity to build ribosomes internally, steps that would extend lineage persistence and reduce reliance on supplied components. The work does not yet constitute a living system, but it provides a controlled chassis for probing which genes and structures are truly essential for basic cellular tasks.