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

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-f...-20260701/

INTRO: or 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. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle.

It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak(opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”

The cell is not alive by any definition. It can’t survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery needed to make proteins. It has no defenses or a good waste removal system. But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife, a goal that synthetic biologists have been chasing for decades.

“It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto(opens a new tab), a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. “It’s not completely there yet, but it’s definitely getting quite close.”

Since these cells were pieced together from scratch, and all the molecular parts were crafted in the lab, scientists can tinker with the system and switch components in and out. “I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component,” said Kate Adamala(opens a new tab), a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota who led the new study, which is not yet peer-reviewed; the paper(opens a new tab) was posted on the scientific preprint site biorxiv.org on July 2. With such flexibility, this kind of synthetic cell could eventually be coaxed to create new materials, such as biofuels and drugs, and help researchers study disease.

t could also give scientists insight into some of their deepest existential questions: What is the minimum needed to sustain life? How could life start? What happens if we alter the biology that composes life on Earth today?

Or, as Adamala put it: “What else can biology do?” (MORE - details)

[Zinjanthropos]

Sounds so much like the Martin Hanczyc oil droplets experiments of dozen years ago, maybe longer. Remember seeing him on TED Talks and how the droplets showed lifelike behavior. Didn't that Dr Ventner (spelling?) guy do same using pieces of real cells?

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Sounds so much like the Martin Hanczyc oil droplets experiments of dozen years ago, maybe longer. Remember seeing him on TED Talks and how the droplets showed lifelike behavior. Didn't that Dr Ventner (spelling?) guy do same using pieces of real cells?

This is using liposomes, a bit closer to an actual cell membranes rather than oil droplets. As a result, they had great difficulty figuring out how to get them to divide.

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. By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky 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.

“I wasn’t allowing myself to believe it for a while,” she said. “It was like, ‘Holy shit, did I actually make a dividing cell?’ … At some point, you’ve been checking enough that [you think], ‘OK, now it’s real.’”

And their synthetic gene replication system is too perfect to allow for evolution...

What Adamala’s team demonstrated was not quite natural selection, the primary mechanism that drives evolutionary change, in which organisms that are better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive. Even if she got their cell to produce more daughter cells, she doesn’t think it would lead to evolution. That’s because Adamala’s team had to create genetic variation synthetically, instead of allowing for random mutations in DNA. The enzyme that builds new DNA strands works too well, she said; it doesn’t introduce meaningful mutations into the sequence. They will need to find an enzyme that is more error-prone — but not so error-prone that the genome’s integrity and the cell’s function is lost.