Overview
- The research team posted a bioRxiv preprint on July 2 reporting a bottom-up synthetic system called SpudCell that takes up nutrients, grows, copies DNA, divides and transmits beneficial variants over roughly five laboratory generations.
- SpudCell is assembled from defined chemical parts — liposome membranes, a stripped-down protein synthesis mix and a roughly 90,000–base-pair genome split across seven plasmids — so every functional molecule in the system is specified by the builders.
- The cells rely on externally supplied 'feeder' liposomes and pre-made protein synthesis components because they cannot yet make ribosomes or a full metabolism, which limits lineages to about five to ten generations and prevents autonomy.
- In competition experiments the authors showed Darwinian selection: cells engineered to fuse with feeder liposomes more efficiently rose from an even mix to as much as 61% of the population over five generations, and the advantage grew when food was scarce.
- The work took several researcher-years and prompted the authors to form Biotic, a nonprofit aimed at standardizing and sharing methods to enable independent replication, scaling and next steps such as encoding ribosome production and extending generational persistence.