Scientists at the University of Minnesota say they have built the most life-like synthetic cell yet, creating a laboratory-made system assembled entirely from nonliving components that can grow, replicate its genetic material, divide and even pass beneficial traits to future generations.
The researchers describe the work as a major step toward building artificial life, but said the synthetic cells cannot survive outside carefully controlled laboratory conditions and require externally supplied nutrients and specialized components to grow and divide.
Their findings were published Thursday as a preprint on bioRxiv, meaning the research has not yet undergone peer review.
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“One of the most ambitious and fascinating goals of bioengineering is to build a biochemical system that could cross the threshold from chemistry to life,” the researchers wrote. They said the work demonstrates “the first minimal cell with a cell cycle, genetically encoded growth and division, all coupled to selection and competition.”
The researchers call the synthetic cell “SpudCell.” Unlike earlier approaches that started with living organisms, SpudCell was assembled from chemically defined, nonliving components.
Its 90,000-base-pair genome enables the synthetic cell to produce proteins, replicate its DNA, feed, grow and divide into daughter cells.
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Researchers also introduced a genetic mutation that allowed some synthetic cells to grow faster than others. After several generations, those faster-growing cells produced more offspring and became increasingly common in the population, demonstrating a basic form of natural selection.
The team said the work represents “key milestones towards construction of synthetic life” and could eventually provide a foundation for “fully artificial organisms” designed for biotechnology applications.
Still, the researchers acknowledged that the system remains far less capable than even the simplest living cells. The synthetic cells cannot survive outside laboratory conditions, require externally supplied nutrients and specialized components and rely on ribosomes purified from E. coli bacteria. After five generations, researchers found that only about 30% of daughter cells inherited the complete synthetic genome.
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Those limitations mean the work falls well short of creating self-sustaining artificial life, but researchers said it demonstrates that many of life’s defining characteristics can be recreated from nonliving materials.
The researchers also acknowledged that increasingly sophisticated synthetic cells could raise new biosafety and biosecurity questions.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the University of Minnesota research team for comment on the matter.
“This project offers a significant milestone towards evolvability of synthetic cells, making it more likely that more robust, autonomous systems will be available soon,” the authors wrote, adding that the progress “highlights the urgent need to develop a safety and security framework for future synthetic cell engineering.”
Future work, the researchers said, will focus on making synthetic cells more self-sufficient by regenerating more of their own molecular machinery, improving how genomes are distributed during cell division and allowing mutations to arise naturally rather than being introduced by researchers.
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