Scientists have long dreamed of discovering the alchemy by which chemicals can be turned into life. On Wednesday, a team at the University of Minnesota announced that it had taken a major step toward that vision.
Blending together dozens of ingredients, the researchers have synthesized simple cells that feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food. If these cells are not yet fully alive, they have most of the hallmarks of life.
“Life is not binary,” said Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist who led the research. “That’s why I’m hesitant to call this ‘alive.’ There’s no clear line, as much as we would love it to be.”
Until now, scientists had never mastered the recipe for a cell that can perform so many functions, said John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study.
“It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.
Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, said, “It’s a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do.”
Dr. Adamala named her creation SpudCell, after its potato-like appearance. Rather than patent it, she and Dr. Endy are organizing a community of scientists to focus on making SpudCells more fully alive and adapting them to new kinds of experiments.
They and their colleagues have founded a nonprofit research organization that Dr. Endy estimates will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort in the next decade. Hundreds of scientists are expected to join.
“We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.
Dr. Adamala and her colleagues posted a 190-page account of their work online. The research is under review for publication in a scientific journal.
Scientists hope synthetic cells can tell them things about life that natural cells cannot, including such basic questions as how many genes are necessary for a minimal form of life.
But synthetic cells also might someday be engineered to do things that natural cells can’t, like making new kinds of medicine or drawing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In theory, engineered SpudCells might produce a vast range of proteins that natural cells cannot be coaxed to make, or even toxic chemicals like rocket fuel.
Now, “we can think about doing chemistry that we’re barely getting our heads around,” Dr. Glass said.
The trouble with life as we know it: mysterious, messy complexity. Our own DNA contains tens of thousands of genes, as well as millions of molecular switches turning those genes on and off. Scientists barely have a clue as to what many of those pieces of DNA are doing. Often a gene that they think they understand turns out to be performing other jobs than scientists expected.
One way to sidestep this intricacy is to simplify.
In the 1990s, a team led by the late biologist Craig Venter began studying a microbe that had fewer than 1,000 genes. The team, now led by Dr. Glass, went on to strip the microbe’s genome down to 525 essential genes.
In a 2016 paper, the team reported it didn’t know what a third of those genes were doing. Dr. Glass and his colleagues have spent the last decade trying to solve the puzzle, and they still can’t say what 56 of them do.
“There are still significant tasks that every cell has to do that we don’t know,” Dr. Glass said.
Other researchers tackled the problem from the opposite direction. Instead of working from the top down, they moved from the bottom up, seeking to combine lifeless molecules to produce a living cell.
Since the 1990s, several labs have bitten off small pieces of this problem. Some of them have perfected recipes to make hollow bubbles from oily molecules. Others have found ways to encapsulate simple genetic molecules inside those bubbles.
But scientists struggled to put these pieces together into more complex systems, let alone something that could be called a cell.
In recent years, Dr. Adamala took on one of the fundamental challenges: cell division. A natural cell divides with the help of proteins that lock together into a ring anchored to its inner wall. The ring winds itself tighter, pinching the cell in two.
Other proteins act like winches, moving DNA and other molecules into the forming cells, so that they have the ingredients necessary to keep living.
At first, Dr. Adamala tried building a simpler version of the natural system. But then she decided not to mimic real cells at all.
Biophysicists had found that if they stuck proteins on a membrane, they created pressure that made the membrane bend. Dr. Adamala and her team created bubbles that could snag proteins floating around them. When a bubble collected enough proteins, its surface began bending inward until it popped in two.
While the idea was simple, getting it to work in the lab required a year of experiments. “But once it works, it works,” Dr. Adamala said.
That success prompted the team to try to build a synthetic cell in its entirety.
The first step was to create a broth of the molecules necessary for a cell to operate. The recipe ultimately included about a hundred kinds of proteins and simple molecules required for crucial chemical reactions, such as making new proteins from genes.
The researchers also provided their synthetic cell with genes borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli. They picked 36 genes for basic jobs like copying DNA.
After mixing these ingredients together into a soup, the scientists added the building blocks of membranes. They spontaneously joined together into bubbles, each engulfing some of the soup.
Many of these bubbles ended up encasing the right mix of genes, proteins and other molecules, and they started carrying out the chemical reactions seen in real cells.
As the new cells floated in flasks, Dr. Adamala and her colleagues added food. The cells slurped up small molecules through channels on their surfaces.
The scientists also put in small bubbles loaded with proteins and other molecules that were too big to fit through the channels. By bumping and fusing into one of these bubbles, the cell could feed on the treats inside.
As the cells fed, they grew. And in just a few hours, they were big enough to divide.
The scientists added a special protein to the flasks, which latched onto the surface of the cells and forced them to bend inward. Once the cells split in two, the pair of new cells kept growing.
Now the SpudCells grew, fed and reproduced. As it turned out, the cells even had a rudimentary ability to evolve.
Dr. Adamala and her colleagues created a mutant version that bound more tightly to the snack-filled bubbles floating around it. To test it, they created a 50-50 mixture of original and mutant SpudCells.
The cells competed for five generations for food. Eventually the mutants outnumbered the originals, suggesting that they were outcompeting the originals for food.
“That’s the shake-the-ground accomplishment here,” said Dr. Zia. Scientists will be able to put various synthetic cells in competition with one another and rapidly develop more sophisticated ones.
For all this evidence of life, SpudCell still has some major shortcomings. For starters, it can’t make the molecular factory that produces new proteins, called a ribosome. The cells can carry all the genes they need to build ribosomes, but for some reason the parts don’t come together.
For now, Dr. Adamala and her colleagues have to feed ready-made ribosomes to SpudCells. This solution has an expiration date, though: SpudCells can keep making proteins through five to 10 generations before they fail as their ribosomes become defective.
“I don’t want to say it dies, but it stops working,” Dr. Adamala said.
When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers.
“I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said. One of the first tasks for Biotic will be to make it easier for other scientists to create SpudCells.
Dr. Adamala can create a fresh batch of them in her own lab in about a day. But that’s only because she has freezers full of purified proteins and an intimate understanding of each step of her recipe. Biotic expects to offer scientists easier recipes and provide the required ingredients.
Dr. Endy hopes that the open-source tools will encourage scientists to collaborate on building new kinds of SpudCells with more of the defining features of life, such as the ability to make their own ribosomes and to divide indefinitely.
“It’s completely doable,” said Dr. Glass.
Biotic researchers are already planning their first meeting, in September in Philadelphia. High on their list of priorities will be formalizing plans to safeguard this area of research.
For now, the synthetic cell can only survive a few generations on a special lab diet. But future versions may be more robust, raising the possibility that someone might someday use SpudCells unethically, perhaps even to make a weapon.
Dr. Endy argues that an open-source research community will be better prepared to prevent that from happening. “We can have these conversations now, as opposed to waiting for somebody else to do it, and then we’re just all reacting,” he said.
Dr. Endy likens SpudCells to a biological version of the Wright flyer, the crude plane that the Wright Brothers used to make the first sustained controlled flight in 1903, ushering in the age of airplanes.
“The Wright flyer flying for 12 seconds doesn’t get you a 737,” Dr. Endy said. “This is just the beginning.”
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