SpudCell can eat, grow and divide. Scientists built it from scratch in a petri dish, and it does not contain a single unknown ingredient.
The research, released to the preprint database bioRxiv on July 2, has not yet been peer-reviewed. It introduces a new type of artificial cell and marks what its creators call a major step toward building living cells from non-living parts. According to Live Science, study co-author Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, says the goal is not simply to recreate life but to build something useful.
"I do not believe [SpudCell] is alive," Adamala told Live Science. She describes the system instead as a framework that could generate "all the chemicals we need for our civilization with biology." The thought is that SpudCell could serve as a tiny factory, producing medicines, fertilizers, plastics or other compounds without relying on petroleum products.
To build it, Adamala and her team combined 36 purified enzymes and a fatty membrane with a pared-back genome about 50 times smaller than that of an average bacterial cell. By mixing these human-made components, they created a system that could complete a full cell cycle in a petri dish. The name SpudCell comes from its potato-like shape, and is also a nod to the Sputnik satellite.
"We built a cell-like system that is fully chemically defined, so there are no unknown building blocks in it," Adamala said. "It's capable of doing things that people up until now used to think only natural living cells can do."
The announcement has drawn some criticism. Several scientists have suggested the release was timed to attract attention alongside the simultaneous launch of the authors' nonprofit Biotic, which aims to raise money to develop the SpudCell platform further. Adamala does not dispute that charge. She says she wants more attention and funding directed at her field.
"I feel this incredible stressful urgency that if we don't get to work on it now, then we're going to run out of time," she said. "We need to highlight that bioengineering can offer a solution. That's why I'm doing it."
The concept of recreating a cell cycle outside a living organism is not entirely new. The J. Craig Venter Institute's 2016 minimal cell paper explored something similar by stripping as many genes from a bacterium as possible. What Adamala's team claims is different is that SpudCell is built entirely from purified, defined components rather than derived from an existing organism. That distinction, they argue, makes it a cleaner and more controllable platform.
The preprint is available now, and peer review has not yet taken place. Biotic, the nonprofit launched alongside the paper, is currently seeking funding to continue development of the platform.
