14 ms·

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

957 points by defrost 4mo ago

https://biotic.org/research/spudcell/ https://biotic.org/research/spudcell/ https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uVA.6Rwg.20U5t0kLK6oU&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc...

bensyverson 4mo 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?
- TSiege 4mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation
  - colordrops 4mo 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.
    - NetMageSCW 4mo ago
      I don’t think biological cells are likely to lead to grey goo the way nanobots are - we may just end up with green and pink goo instead of animals and plants though.
  - PaulHoule 4mo 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-bacterial-cell 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"
  - senkora 4mo 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_fungi_platinum/Ch17_18.htm https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...
    - TSiege 4mo ago
      Very interesting! Thanks for sharing
- arjie 4mo 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.
  - dbingham 4mo 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.
    - Zambyte 4mo ago
      It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
- adrian_b 4mo 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 4mo 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.
    - adrian_b 4mo ago
      As a multi-cellular organism, a brain-dead human is not alive, even if most of its cells may remain alive as long as they are fed from outside. OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other. My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture. These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Have you not seen Jurassic Park?
  - 0x1ceb00da 4mo ago
    Have you not seen big shark? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA
- Legend2440 4mo 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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- yread 4mo 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
  - hoppp 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
  - kilobaud 4mo 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- 4mo ago
    Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.” You can’t win
    - groceries8192 4mo ago
      Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
    - 4mo ago
- hoppp 4mo 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
burnte 4mo 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.
- dnautics 4mo 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_massa 4mo 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.
    - dnautics 4mo ago
      It's generally possible to epimerize l-amino acids to d- (or functionalize glycine) but you're competing with nonmirror life at that point. plus bacteria will love love love the d-alanine you make
      - gus_massa 4mo ago
        Thanks for the correction. What about the peptide bound? Can normal bacteria break mirror-proteins?
- scarmig 4mo ago
soraki_soladead 4mo ago
This is awesome! Can someone in this field comment on the implications of sidestepping the cytoskeleton?
- tom-villani 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - red75prime 4mo 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?
small_model 4mo ago
The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!
- JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo 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. ;)
    - thriftwy 4mo ago
      https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html offers a fascinating narrative rooted in cell biology
- aerodexis 4mo ago
  It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.
  - LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
    Just wait 'til he finds out the alien was Trelane and he just wanted more soldiers for his play army.
- germandiago 4mo ago
  I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...
JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo ago
  (opens a new tab)
  - khriss 4mo ago
    Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?
    - kridsdale1 4mo ago
      More likely stuff that gets picked up when you copy and paste. I’ve seen that happen in the Google Chat electron app.
    - satvikpendem 4mo ago
      Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?
      - sourpanda 4mo ago
        that's exactly it, not AI at all. If you inspect any link in the article it shows it as screen-reader-text
mghackerlady 4mo 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 4mo ago
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
- bell-cot 4mo ago
  "And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]
codemax98 4mo ago
I love exciting scientific news like this
joh6nn 4mo ago
For the love of all things holy, can we not do these kinds of experiments on the same planet we live on?
- dyauspitr 4mo 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 4mo ago
  I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?
  - qsera 4mo ago
    >why can't they be positive? Because no one minds if good things happen...
- JanJedryszek 4mo ago
  :(
humanfromearth9 4mo ago
I wonder what animal or plant would grow out of that...
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Neither. This is a single cell. Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.
quux 4mo ago
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038
deadbabe 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - deadbabe 4mo 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.
    - tete 4mo ago
      You should be able. Go for it.
Imustaskforhelp 4mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742483
CurbStomper 4mo ago
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october8140 4mo 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 4mo ago
Uh-oh
germandiago 4mo ago
That is closer to consciousness than AI will ever be. :)
- red75prime 4mo ago
  Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)
- namero999 4mo 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.
- JanJedryszek 4mo ago
  yes
- grantcas 4mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
merksittich 4mo 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-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...
- oliverx0 4mo ago
  Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology
  - cogman10 4mo 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.
    - 1234letshaveatw 4mo ago
      Cause of all the theists at cell
  - Aachen 4mo 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
srean 4mo ago
Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.
- DesiLurker 4mo ago
  let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)
- dehrmann 4mo 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.
  - srean 4mo ago
    Yes. It's still quite a distance away from a feel and taste of meat. At least the affordable ones.
- adrianN 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- tsunamifury 4mo ago
  The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.
Tenoke 4mo 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.
oliverx0 4mo ago
If anyone is interested in the actual manuscript, here it is: https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/spudcell-manuscript.pdf https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/spudcell-manuscript...
ahmedfromtunis 4mo 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.
- xpct 4mo 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.
  - ahmedfromtunis 4mo 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.
    - xpct 4mo ago
      In this case I'm seeing 'micromanaging' as something akin to automating a Tesla superfactory: machines complete each individual step, we get a working car at the end. Obviously, we'd have processes built that build machines for each of the individual tasks, or changing tracks to support new car models. From my perspective, this framework of a factory could map to many other endeavours where we either produce the end product or a machine used for something else. So, the difference would be whether the machines utilize chemical/biological processes for working, or are made out of steel, at which point it would boil down to economics. I guess I don't see what's so special about adding 'bio' to these perpetual factories.
somelamer567 4mo ago
So what is being described here? Scratch-built self-replicating nano-machines inspired by biology? That itself seems significant.
netfortius 4mo ago
Reminded me of Maturana and his autopoiesis.
blorbthrow 4mo 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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
Animats 4mo ago
Craig Venter wanted to do this. But he died earlier this year.
catigula 4mo ago
For some reason, research like this has a much more apocalyptic feeling than it has in the past.
amai 4mo ago
The wikipedia website to "It's alive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 4mo ago
The people behind it: https://biotic.org/ 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 4mo ago
  Everything they are doing is dual use. Thus I don't feel the benefit.
thejokeisonme 4mo ago
If you read a bit you learn that it's not a cell. Bad title imo.
kadomony 4mo ago
This is literally how Cell was made. Cell Saga, here we go.
commieneko 4mo 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 4mo ago
  What are the guardrails here?
  - commieneko 4mo ago
    I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.
    - bellowsgulch 4mo ago
      A lot of high school biology underpins the most immediate interesting aspects of chemistry and biology, and also the most volatile and dangerous ones.
    - libraryatnight 4mo ago
      I'm curious what you asked? I had Opus 4.8 ingest the URL and give me some ideas about what's possible and it eventually got to AI and self repairing/improving factories along with listing risks etc.
      - commieneko 4mo ago
        Here's what I asked it: "The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses." I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works. None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t. (I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)
dizhn 4mo 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 4mo ago
NYT piece with visualizations: This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. and It's Manmade https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038)
fschuett 4mo ago
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bomewish 4mo ago
The “from scratch” is doing a lot of work here!
- FloorEgg 4mo 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 4mo 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+of+work+here&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...
  - tete 4mo 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.
    - rmunn 4mo ago
      The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.
  - jibal 4mo ago
    It's an ancient phrase.
akomtu 4mo 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.
- wartywhoa23 4mo ago
  They are inspired by transhumanist agenda and corresponding VC backing.
JanJedryszek 4mo ago
I;m one of the co-founders, AMA :)
- nashashmi 4mo 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?
  - JanJedryszek 4mo 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!
    - nashashmi 4mo ago
      > The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing I think it will be a missed opportunity to not foresee manufacturing applications of "biological machinery". Enzymes have long been used in manufacturing, especially in chemistry. For the first time, ribosomes and membranes could be used as well.
- Kotlopou 4mo 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?
jonahss 4mo 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 4mo ago
I look forward to never hearing about this ever again.
caycep 4mo ago
this is how Sekiguchi Genetics got started. Or maybe Weyland Yutani Corporation
ygmelnikova 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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galaxyLogic 4mo ago
Frankenstein!
greazy 4mo ago
It appears the scientists or someone close to them have created a wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpudCell 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
vanshitahuja 4mo ago
[flagged]
yehosef 4mo 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 4mo ago
se penso ad una cosa del genere mi vengono totalmente i brividi
SwtCyber 4mo ago
"Not alive, but doing a suspicious number of alive-looking things" is a pretty good summary of why this is cool
aniketsaini777 4mo ago
[flagged]
localdeclan 4mo 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 4mo ago
I could have told them that this would work, it's pretty obvious!
DrScientist 4mo 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.

957 points by defrost 4mo ago

bensyverson 4mo 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?

TSiege 4mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation
- colordrops 4mo 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.
  - NetMageSCW 4mo ago
    I don’t think biological cells are likely to lead to grey goo the way nanobots are - we may just end up with green and pink goo instead of animals and plants though.
- PaulHoule 4mo 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-bacterial-cell 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"
- senkora 4mo 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_fungi_platinum/Ch17_18.htm https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...
  - TSiege 4mo ago
    Very interesting! Thanks for sharing
arjie 4mo 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.
- dbingham 4mo 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.
  - Zambyte 4mo ago
    It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
adrian_b 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    As a multi-cellular organism, a brain-dead human is not alive, even if most of its cells may remain alive as long as they are fed from outside. OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other. My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture. These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.
JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
Have you not seen Jurassic Park?
- 0x1ceb00da 4mo ago
  Have you not seen big shark? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2kCBlRZ4fA
Legend2440 4mo 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.
deleted 4mo ago
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yread 4mo 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
- hoppp 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
- kilobaud 4mo 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- 4mo ago
  Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.” You can’t win
  - groceries8192 4mo ago
    Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
  - 4mo ago
hoppp 4mo 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

burnte 4mo 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.

dnautics 4mo 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_massa 4mo 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.
  - dnautics 4mo ago
    It's generally possible to epimerize l-amino acids to d- (or functionalize glycine) but you're competing with nonmirror life at that point. plus bacteria will love love love the d-alanine you make
    - gus_massa 4mo ago
      Thanks for the correction. What about the peptide bound? Can normal bacteria break mirror-proteins?
scarmig 4mo ago

soraki_soladead 4mo ago

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

tom-villani 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- red75prime 4mo 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?

small_model 4mo ago

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

JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo 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. ;)
  - thriftwy 4mo ago
    https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html offers a fascinating narrative rooted in cell biology
aerodexis 4mo ago
It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.
- LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
  Just wait 'til he finds out the alien was Trelane and he just wanted more soldiers for his play army.
germandiago 4mo ago
I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...

JumpCrisscross 4mo 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 4mo ago
(opens a new tab)
- khriss 4mo ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?
  - kridsdale1 4mo ago
    More likely stuff that gets picked up when you copy and paste. I’ve seen that happen in the Google Chat electron app.
  - satvikpendem 4mo ago
    Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?
    - sourpanda 4mo ago
      that's exactly it, not AI at all. If you inspect any link in the article it shows it as screen-reader-text

mghackerlady 4mo 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 4mo ago

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

bell-cot 4mo ago
"And that is why God is far less interested in modern mortal affairs than Theists want Him to be." - [source forgotten]

codemax98 4mo ago

I love exciting scientific news like this

joh6nn 4mo ago

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

dyauspitr 4mo 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 4mo ago
I blame black mirror for this attitude. If you're going to speculate on imaginary futures why can't they be positive?
- qsera 4mo ago
  >why can't they be positive? Because no one minds if good things happen...
JanJedryszek 4mo ago
:(

humanfromearth9 4mo ago

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

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
Neither. This is a single cell. Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.

quux 4mo ago

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

deadbabe 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- deadbabe 4mo 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.
  - tete 4mo ago
    You should be able. Go for it.

Imustaskforhelp 4mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742483

CurbStomper 4mo ago

[dead]

october8140 4mo 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 4mo ago

Uh-oh

germandiago 4mo ago

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

red75prime 4mo ago
Elan conscietal? (a pun on elan vital)
namero999 4mo 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.
JanJedryszek 4mo ago
yes
grantcas 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago

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merksittich 4mo 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-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...

oliverx0 4mo ago
Crazy that a Cell reviewer would claim synthetic biology is not biology
- cogman10 4mo 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.
  - 1234letshaveatw 4mo ago
    Cause of all the theists at cell
- Aachen 4mo 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

srean 4mo ago

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

DesiLurker 4mo ago
let me put it this way .. it will come before the wallet gives out! (for masses)
dehrmann 4mo 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.
- srean 4mo ago
  Yes. It's still quite a distance away from a feel and taste of meat. At least the affordable ones.
adrianN 4mo 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 4mo 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.

tsunamifury 4mo ago
The wheel is not a car. However a wheel is a strong indication that car-like structures are at least possible.

Tenoke 4mo 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.

oliverx0 4mo ago

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

ahmedfromtunis 4mo 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.

xpct 4mo 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.
- ahmedfromtunis 4mo 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.
  - xpct 4mo ago
    In this case I'm seeing 'micromanaging' as something akin to automating a Tesla superfactory: machines complete each individual step, we get a working car at the end. Obviously, we'd have processes built that build machines for each of the individual tasks, or changing tracks to support new car models. From my perspective, this framework of a factory could map to many other endeavours where we either produce the end product or a machine used for something else. So, the difference would be whether the machines utilize chemical/biological processes for working, or are made out of steel, at which point it would boil down to economics. I guess I don't see what's so special about adding 'bio' to these perpetual factories.

somelamer567 4mo ago

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

netfortius 4mo ago

Reminded me of Maturana and his autopoiesis.

blorbthrow 4mo 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.

deleted 4mo ago
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Animats 4mo ago

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

catigula 4mo ago

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

amai 4mo ago

The wikipedia website to "It's alive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 4mo ago

The people behind it: https://biotic.org/ 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 4mo ago
Everything they are doing is dual use. Thus I don't feel the benefit.

thejokeisonme 4mo ago

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

kadomony 4mo ago

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

commieneko 4mo 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 4mo ago
What are the guardrails here?
- commieneko 4mo ago
  I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.
  - bellowsgulch 4mo ago
    A lot of high school biology underpins the most immediate interesting aspects of chemistry and biology, and also the most volatile and dangerous ones.
  - libraryatnight 4mo ago
    I'm curious what you asked? I had Opus 4.8 ingest the URL and give me some ideas about what's possible and it eventually got to AI and self repairing/improving factories along with listing risks etc.
    - commieneko 4mo ago
      Here's what I asked it: "The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses." I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works. None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t. (I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)

dizhn 4mo 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 4mo ago

NYT piece with visualizations: This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. and It's Manmade https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747038)

fschuett 4mo ago

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bomewish 4mo ago

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

FloorEgg 4mo 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 4mo 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+of+work+here&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...
- tete 4mo 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.
  - rmunn 4mo ago
    The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.
- jibal 4mo ago
  It's an ancient phrase.

akomtu 4mo 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.

wartywhoa23 4mo ago
They are inspired by transhumanist agenda and corresponding VC backing.

JanJedryszek 4mo ago

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

nashashmi 4mo 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?
- JanJedryszek 4mo 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!
  - nashashmi 4mo ago
    > The self-replication and division you're picturing comes from that biological machinery copying and dividing I think it will be a missed opportunity to not foresee manufacturing applications of "biological machinery". Enzymes have long been used in manufacturing, especially in chemistry. For the first time, ribosomes and membranes could be used as well.
Kotlopou 4mo 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?

jonahss 4mo 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 4mo ago

I look forward to never hearing about this ever again.

caycep 4mo ago

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

ygmelnikova 4mo ago

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galaxyLogic 4mo ago

Frankenstein!

greazy 4mo ago

It appears the scientists or someone close to them have created a wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpudCell 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.

vanshitahuja 4mo ago

[flagged]

yehosef 4mo 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 4mo ago

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

SwtCyber 4mo ago

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

aniketsaini777 4mo ago

[flagged]

localdeclan 4mo 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 4mo ago

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

DrScientist 4mo 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.