A lab at the University of Minnesota has built what they’re calling SpudCells — artificial cells enclosed in membranes that can import materials, grow, and even divide. For about five generations, at least, before things fall apart.
The work, led by Kate Adamala, hasn’t been peer reviewed yet. But the preprint is worth paying attention to.
Here’s the basic problem: making membranes spontaneously form in water is easy. They’ll happily enclose anything dissolved in that water, including DNA. But once they close up, the interior is cut off. Any chemical reactions inside eat through their raw materials and stop.
Adamala’s team solved that by adding a gene for a pore protein. Small molecules and ions can diffuse in and out. For the bigger stuff — like the protein complexes needed to actually make new proteins — they built a feeding system. Large materials get encased in a separate membrane with a tag on it. The tag binds to the pore protein, the membranes fuse, and the food spills in.
Growth leads to division. The researchers figured out how to make the pore proteins clump by adding certain chemicals. That distorts the membrane until parts bud off. It’s random, but it works.
The genome is spread across seven separate circular DNA molecules. When cells divide, copies get distributed at random. After five generations, most SpudCells are missing at least one of those seven molecules. That’s the wall they hit.
Still, the team showed natural selection works even in these artificial conditions. They tweaked the pore protein levels and found that higher-producing cells grew faster in low-food environments. After five generations, the fast feeders took over the population.
This isn’t a direct model of early life. It relies on highly evolved proteins and carefully engineered conditions. But it gives researchers a sandbox to ask questions about minimal life, membrane biology, and what happens when you strip a cell down to the absolute basics.
