Scientists Build a Cell From Scratch That Grows, Copies Its DNA, and Divides

For the first time, biologists have packed nonliving molecules into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and watched the bag of chemicals begin to behave like life. The lab-made cell grew, replicated its DNA, and split into daughter cells — the basic beats of a cell cycle, assembled from ingredients that were never alive to begin with. Reported by Quanta Magazine on July 1, the work comes out of the University of Minnesota lab of synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, whose team posted its preprint to bioRxiv the following day.

The result is not life by any definition the researchers accept. The cell cannot survive without constant hand-delivered deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery cells use to make proteins. It has no defenses and no real waste-removal system. But it is the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to coax life, or something close to it, out of nonlife in a lab.

"I don't know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far," said Jack Szostak, an origins-of-life researcher at the University of Chicago and Adamala's former doctoral adviser, who was not involved in the study. He called it "an impressive step."

How They Built It

Adamala's team worked from the ground up, using the same kinds of molecules that Earth's biology already relies on. They started with liposomes — hollow sacs enclosed by a simple lipid membrane — to serve as the cellular body, then assembled a genome and the supplies to run it.

The synthetic genome is tiny: roughly 90,000 base pairs spread across seven plasmids, encoding about 36 genes — smaller than what biologists once speculated a living cell could get away with. For DNA replication, the team adapted a system pioneered by synthetic biologists Hannes Mutschler and Christophe Danelon, then tuned it to run alongside a commercial pack of 36 enzymes that let the cell transcribe DNA and translate it into proteins. Getting those genetic systems to work in concert took relentless tinkering — swapping genes in and out and adjusting molecular concentrations until the machinery clicked.

Because the genome carries no metabolic genes, the researchers built "supply packs": separate liposomes filled with sugars, lipids, enzymes, transfer RNA, and ribosomes. They engineered a membrane protein that attracts these bubbles so that, on contact, the membranes fuse and the cargo spills in. That gives the cell its food — but it is also why the cell remains dependent on outside help.

Division was the hardest part, and the place the whole field had been stuck. Real cells reorganize their cytoskeleton to pinch in two, a process synthetic biologists could not reproduce. So Adamala ditched the cytoskeleton entirely. Following a mechanism described by Reinhard Lipowsky at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, she attached protein tags to the membrane that recruit other proteins to crowd around and physically bend it, forcing the cell to split. After several attempts, it worked.

"I wasn't allowing myself to believe it for a while," Adamala recalled. "It was like, 'Holy shit, did I actually make a dividing cell?'"

The cells picked up a nickname along the way. When students started calling them "Adamala cells," she pushed back and jokingly suggested potatoes instead. They became spudcells. "I'm Polish, I'm mostly made of potatoes, so that's fine with me," she said.

The spudcells are slow and short-lived. Replication takes roughly 12 hours at 30 degrees Celsius — E. coli divides every 30 minutes — and the cells manage only five to 10 generations before petering out. When the team introduced synthetic genetic variation, cells engineered to grow larger also produced more daughters and came to dominate the population, a first glimpse of selection. But because the replication enzyme is too accurate to throw off useful mutations on its own, this was not yet true Darwinian evolution.

Why It Matters

The spudcell lands in the middle of a broader shift: biology is becoming programmable. AI systems for protein design, genome interpretation, and "foundation models" for the life sciences have turned the cell into something researchers increasingly treat as an engineerable substrate rather than an inscrutable black box. A synthetic cell built entirely from a known parts list is the physical counterpart to that ambition. "I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component," Adamala said — a level of transparency living cells never offer, and the kind of well-specified system that design tools thrive on.

That controllability is the point. Because every part was made in the lab, components can be swapped in and out at will, which could eventually let researchers coax cells into manufacturing biofuels, plastics without fossil fuels, fertilizers, or drugs — including molecules built from amino acids evolution never used. Alongside the paper, Adamala and collaborators announced Biotic, a nonprofit meant to share these tools and methods so other labs can build on the cell.

It is worth being sober about how far this is from life. "The modern cell is like a Dreamliner," Adamala said. "We built a Wright flyer — the first bike frame with wings that flies 100 feet." Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State who was not involved, called it "a synthetic biology tour de force" while cautioning against overhyping a cell that cannot yet sustain itself. This is a landmark in synthetic biology, not the arrival of designer organisms.

What to Watch

The next milestones are clear. The cell needs to make its own ribosomes and proteins to break its dependence on external feeding — the gap Szostak singled out as what still separates spudcells from bacteria. It needs an error-prone-but-not-too-error-prone replication enzyme to enable genuine evolution, what Adamala calls finding the "edge of chaos." And she wants to add a cytoskeleton so the cell stops wasting energy on its crowding-based division trick. Whether an open, blueprint-driven approach — and the shared infrastructure Biotic hopes to build — accelerates the field the way open models accelerated AI is the question now hanging over synthetic biology.

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Sources: Yasemin Saplakoglu, "For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides," Quanta Magazine, July 1, 2026; University of Minnesota; Adamala et al., bioRxiv preprint (posted July 2, 2026).