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Scientists say they have built a "synthetic cell" that can eat, grow and divide in a way that's remarkably similar to living cells.

The research, released to the preprint database bioRxiv July 2, has not been peer-reviewed yet. It introduces SpudCell, a new type of artificial cell, and marks a striking step toward creating living cells from scratch. But for study co-author Kate Adamala , a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, that's far from the most interesting part of the work.

"I do not believe [SpudCell] is alive," Adamala told Live Science. Instead, she describes the system as a framework that could generate "all the chemicals we need for our civilization with biology." The thought is that SpudCell could serve as a tiny factory, pumping out medicines, fertilizers, plastics or any number of other compounds.

The work's announcement has sparked some controversy, with some scientists seeing it as a ploy to gain media attention for the simultaneous launch of the author's nonprofit Biotic , which aims to raise money to further develop the SpudCell platform. Adamala does not take umbrage to that criticism, as she is keen to bring more attention and funding to her field. If a synthetic cell can be perfected, she thinks, it could help humanity generate chemicals without relying as heavily on petroleum products.

"I feel this incredible stressful urgency that if we don't get to work on it now, then we're going to run out of time," she said, referring to the climate crisis . "We need to highlight that bioengineering can offer a solution. That's why I'm doing it."

A synthetic cell and a big promise

According to the preprint, Adamala and her team produced a lifelike system that closely resembles a living cell. To do so, they combined 36 purified enzymes and a fatty membrane with a pared-back genome about 50 times smaller than that of an average bacterial cell. By mixing these human-made elements together, the scientists generated a cell that could feed, grow, and divide — so, in essence, they created a full cell cycle in a petri dish.

"We built a cell-like system that is fully chemically defined, so there are no unknown building blocks in it," Adamala said. "It's capable of doing things that people up until now used to think only natural living cells can do." They call the system "SpudCell" because it looks similar to a potato, The New York Times reported . The name is also a nod to the Sputnik satellite, per CNN .

The concept of recreating the cell cycle in a dish is not entirely new . The J. Craig Venter Institute's 2016 "minimal cell" paper flirted with the concept by stripping as many genes from a bacterium as possible to leave only a minimal cell that could still replicate. However, the new study is the first time scientists have achieved feeding, growing and division using a "bottom-up" approach.

The work marks "a great advancement," said Mauro Rinaldi , a lecturer in biotechnology and biochemistry at the University of Hull in the U.K. who was not involved in the work. "It moves the needle because one of the key things about cells is division."

But there are important caveats. For one, the cells cannot yet create their own energy as our cells do with mitochondria. They also rely on externally provided fats, sugars and enzymes. The cells cannot make their own ribosomes, the machinery that turns genetic instructions into working parts of the cell. That means it relies on proteins being delivered from the outside.

Left: A super-resolution image of SpudCell's liposomes with an encapsulated genome and active protein expression. Right: A SpudCell encapsulates a whole genome. The DNA of the genome and the synthetic cell membrane are stained with fluorescent dyes. (Image credit: Orion Venero, Adamala Lab) Another difference is that SpudCell's genome is spread out over bits of DNA called plasmids, rather than being neatly packaged in chromosomes. It does not possess the skeleton that cells typically use to neatly split DNA during cell division, so consequently, the division of SpudCell's DNA to its daughter cells can be somewhat haphazard.

"The description of the results leaves me with substantial technical questions regarding the nature and the robustness of the findings," said Cees Dekker , a biophysicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. "[Its] approach uses some ingenious engineering tricks as shortcuts to achieve complex functions such as growth, but a major challenge remains to create a truly autonomous cell that executes all these functions without external help," he said.

Dekker is among the scientists who would have preferred that the research made the news after being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If these findings are solid, that great media attention is definitely warranted; if peer review would, however, reveal weaknesses or issues, all the current media reporting is premature," he argued.

From cell to manufacturing platform

Adamala sees SpudCell as a blank slate for engineering. "We believe that if we make a cell from scratch, that's fully engineerable," she said.

Cells have long been used to produce chemicals for human use. Millions of people use synthetic insulin made in bacteria and yeast cells, for example. But cells resist making chemicals that could be harmful to them, and through evolution, they've developed systems to prevent them from doing so. A SpudCell-like system could circumvent those natural hurdles, Adamala and her colleagues think.

That kind of platform could also be useful for making newer generations of medicines, such as those based on mRNA or peptides. These drugs use molecular building blocks, like amino acids or nucleotides, that have been chemically tweaked to make the molecules more stable or harder for the body to break down. SpudCell could be engineered to produce such modified components directly, rather than scientists having to synthesize them in traditional chemistry labs. This could potentially shorten development timelines and lower costs, the team thinks.

Adamala and her colleagues also envision the cells being used as easily shippable laboratories . They could be dried out, shipped, stored without refrigeration, and then activated on-site to make chemicals, vaccines or proteins when and where they are needed.

But there's still a long road ahead. For now, SpudCell is only a proof of principle, and many hurdles must be addressed before it could become an industrial platform.

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"[SpudCell] is not an engineering platform that can give you any useful product, but it's step one," Adamala said. "It's probably at least a couple of decades from now when we can actually scale it up to the point where we can replace all the petrochemicals with biology, but I do believe it's doable."

Adamala hopes the nonprofit Biotic will help funnel donations from philanthropists directly to research. "Biotic is a funding agency that is going to globally fund this work," she said.

While the technology is promising, "it needs to go through peer review," Rinaldi said. "I expect a lot of the hype and some of the terms that they're using to go away after a couple of years have passed."

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Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Avowed, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment, and Grounded, has reportedly been impacted by Xbox's latest round of layoffs .

Several Obsidian developers took to social media to share the news that they too had been let go as part of Xbox's brand "reset" that cut 1,600 jobs today and will ultimately result in 3,200 cut jobs by the end of fiscal year 2027, according to CEO Asha Sharma.

"I and a good number of very talented game devs were laid off by Obsidian as part of the Microsoft sacrificial rituals this morning," reads a Bluesky post from narrative designer Jay Turner, who has credits on Avowed as well as older BioWare classics like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. "If you or anyone you know is looking for a Senior Writer/ND with more than two decades' experience in titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, please let me know!"

Prior to Xbox's announcement, there were rumors and unconfirmed reports that Obsidian was actually one of several Xbox Game Studios negotiating with Microsoft to avoid full-on closure. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier debunked those rumors last week, but unfortunately it seems the beloved RPG studio wasn't able to escape Microsoft's wrath completely unscathed. The exact number of laid-off developers isn't clear, but reporting from Kotaku indicates that around 60-70 people, or roughly 25% of the studio, was cut.

Kate Dollarhyde, a narrative lead at Obsidian who's written for Avowed, Pentiment, The Outer Worlds, and Pillars of Eternity, said on Bluesky that "many excellent developers" at Obsidian lost their jobs today."

An animator at Obsidian said on Bluesky that they were among "dozens" of developers who had lost their jobs. "Incredibly privileged to have landed my dream job right after school. Obsidian was an amazing place to work," they said.

Up until now, Obsidian had been among the more resilient studios under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, but as layoffs hit tentpole developers like Bethesda and Zenimax Online, it seems no one's safe right now.

Bethesda union blasts Microsoft as Xbox layoffs hit the Fallout and Elder Scrolls studio, too: "When will this cycle of cuts in pursuit of ever-greater profits end?"

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FIFA’s leading critic in the European Parliament told POLITICO that the decision to lift a key American player’s one-game suspension was the latest example of an “unbroken pattern” of nontransparent governance in world football’s governing body.

Last week, centrist Irish MEP Barry Andrews penned a letter urging FIFA to investigate its president, Gianni Infantino, over four public statements he made in support of U.S. President Donald Trump last year, which allegedly undermined the body’s political neutrality.

On Monday, after FIFA lifted the ban on American striker Folarin Balogun following a call from Trump to Infantino, POLITICO sat down with Andrews to discuss how the governing body’s latest decision adds fuel to his criticism.

FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Andrews’ latest rebuke, but Infantino released a statement Monday denying allegations that he influenced the decision to lift Balogun’s suspension.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your first reaction when you heard the news that Trump had got involved in Balogun’s case?

It confirms, in my view, that FIFA is a profoundly corrupt organization. Unfortunately, there’s a decadeslong litany of examples of how FIFA has corrupted sport at the highest level. It’s just a further chapter in that litany, unfortunately, and we need to figure out ways to try to put pressure on FIFA to reverse this decision.

MEP Petras Auštrevičius told POLITICO on Friday that FIFA is “not any longer a neutral sports organization.” Do you agree?

Is it not really a lawless organization? The decisions around awarding the World Cup to Qatar and Russia have been demonstrated to be the subject of massive bribery of officials in the executive committee of FIFA and also the confederations across the world. So, unfortunately, what we’re seeing with the recent example of Infantino just proves that this is an unbroken pattern over many decades. When Sepp Blatter was [FIFA president], he had no restraint on his politicization of the role, but Infantino, if it’s possible, is worse.

Blatter said this morning that “football must never become a playground for political power.”

If Blatter thinks it’s corrupt, we’re dealing with towering levels of malpractice.

What do you think the European response should be here?

There’s a lot of people who say “politics and sport don’t mix,” but we’re dealing with an organization that is so powerful. Therefore, we should make a very clear statement on it. There’s a limit on what we can do, but I think we have to be very explicit on denouncing what has happened in this situation since Sunday.

Are you going to be watching the U.S.-Belgium game tonight?

I’ll be watching it. I’m disappointed with everything about the way the U.S. has [conducted the World Cup]. It’s not the fault of the U.S. players, but you just can’t help yourself. You couldn’t imagine what would happen if the U.S. won the tournament.