Overview
- Researchers at the University of Minnesota announced on Wednesday that they built SpudCell, a bottom-up, chemically defined liposome system that completes a full cell cycle of feeding, growth, genome copying, division, and short-run selection.
- SpudCell contains a PURE-like protein-expression mix of purified enzymes, a roughly 90,000 base-pair genome split across multiple plasmids, and a lipid membrane that grows by fusing with externally supplied feeder liposomes.
- Key limits include a reliance on externally supplied ribosomes and frequent feeder liposomes, a functional lifespan of about five to ten generations before machinery degrades, and unreliable inheritance with only about 30% of daughters retaining the full plasmid set.
- The team demonstrated evolution-like competition by engineering higher production of a membrane-fusion protein, which produced faster growth and allowed that variant to outcompete the original population within five generations.
- The authors launched Biotic to share methods and set standards as they work to build ribosome synthesis, consolidate the genome, reduce external feeding, and explore controlled applications such as bespoke drug or material production while experts caution the system is not yet autonomous life.