Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:For more than a decade, scientists have built "minimal cells" capable of some lifelike processes.
In a world first, scientists from the University of Minnesota successfully created a synthetic cell capable of dividing.
"We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell," Adamala said in a press statement.
"Adamala's team designed and built a nonliving synthetic cell that is much closer to being 'alive' than anything else produced by the bottom-up synthetic cell field," John Glass, who leads synthetic cell research at the J. Craig Venter Institute and wasn't involved in the study, told The New York Times.
Advertisement AdvertisementWithout ribosomes and the ability to replicate indefinitely while undergoing Darwinian evolution, SpudCells can't truly be considered alive, Adamala told New Scientist.
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Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
For more than a decade, scientists have built "minimal cells" capable of some lifelike processes.
In a world first, scientists from the University of Minnesota successfully created a synthetic cell capable of dividing.
These "SpudCells," as they're called, aren't truly alive, but they provide a crucial platform for exploring the phenomenon of abiogenesis.
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The best way to understand how something works is to build the thing yourself, particularly when it comes to the intricate mechanics of devices created by humans. Replicating the complex machinery of life itself, however, is often more complicated.
But in a preprint study uploaded to the server bioRxiv, a team of scientists from the University of Minnesota report that they successfully recreated rudimentary cells that can actually divide and multiply for the first time ever. The result is the latest breakthrough in the scientists' ongoing research into the phenomenon of abiogenesis—the moment some four billion years ago when life emerged from a soup of a chemical non-life.
"The modern cell is like a Dreamliner," Katarzyna Adamala, the lead researcher on the project, told Quanta Magazine, a reference to the mechanically sophisticated Boeing 787 airplane. "We built a Wright flyer […] the first bike frame with wings that flies 100 feet."
These so-called SpudCells—named as an homage to Adamala's Polish heritage—build on decades of research surrounding "minimal cells," which are cells with the minimum amount of biological machinery required to survive. One of the most famous examples of a minimal cell is the synthetic bacterium JCVI-syn3.0 (created by the J. Craig Venter institute in Maryland in 2016), which uses only 473 genes and 531,000 base pairs (the human genome, by comparison, contains roughly three billion base pairs). The SpudCells are even more stripped down, with only 36 genes and 90,000 base pairs. Most of those pairs belong to E. coli, though some belong to phage viruses and a few belong to a jellyfish-provided fluorescent protein that was added to make the samples more visible, according to New Scientist.
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The big breakthrough is that the cells can divide—though, admittedly, not in exactly the same way that the cells in our bodies do. Typically, cells rearrange their cytoskeletons (the protein fibers that fill the cytoplasm), halve their DNA, and then split. The SpudCells instead use chemical tags that attract proteins to crowd around the cell membrane, thereby forcing it to pinch apart.
"We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell," Adamala said in a press statement. "It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark."
So, does that mean this creation is alive, just like the original cellular "Wright flyers" of ancient Earth? Well, not so fast. While these new cells are capable of lifelike processes, they don't contain the necessary machinery needed to sustain themselves over the long term. For one, the synthetic cells can't build ribosomes—biological factories responsible for making proteins—so Adamala and her team had to constantly feed the cells crucial proteins and enzymes to keep them alive. Even then, they only managed to survive for a maximum of 10 generations.
"Adamala's team designed and built a nonliving synthetic cell that is much closer to being 'alive' than anything else produced by the bottom-up synthetic cell field," John Glass, who leads synthetic cell research at the J. Craig Venter Institute and wasn't involved in the study, told The New York Times.
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Without ribosomes and the ability to replicate indefinitely while undergoing Darwinian evolution, SpudCells can't truly be considered alive, Adamala told New Scientist. But they do give researchers a new platform to explore the origins of life on Earth, providing a fascinating glimpse into our very, very distant past.
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