Lab-created ‘SpudCell’ marks ‘stunning’ step toward building life from scratch | Science | AAAS
It’s just a microscopic water droplet surrounded by a fatty membrane and stuffed with chemicals and snippets of DNA encoding a mere 36 genes. But it’s also arguably the closest researchers have come to building a living cell from scratch. In work posted online today, University of Minnesota Twin Cities synthetic biologist Kate Adamala and her team show their creation, nicknamed SpudCell, can grow by fusing with other droplets, replicate its genome, and divide. “This is a stunning scientific achievement,” says Roseanna Zia, a computational cell biologist at the University of Missouri. But researchers note that SpudCell remains far from a living cell, as it can’t divide over many generations or evolve. 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 s