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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The research, released to the preprint database bioRxiv July 2, has not been peer-reviewed yet.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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Two of the most interesting aspects of early access space survival MMO EVE Frontier always seemed to exist in opposition to me: Its striking, deliberately crafted vision of a dark future, and its uniquely freeform modding ecosystem . How are you supposed to get in the mood of the former if you're at risk of stumbling across somebody's particularly anarchic or memey mod?

When I spoke to some of Frontier's dev team at this year's EVE Fanfest, they had a surprising answer: It's no big thing, that's just what the inhabitants of Frontier's galaxy are getting up to, god help them.

"I don't want to say this is a problem, but this is an evergreen challenge, an evergreen balance to maintain," said Frontier creative director Pavlo Savchuk. "We're really careful about balancing how much we're revealing to them, so that they have enough for role playing, for third party development, and so that they have strong anchors to art direct themselves, which is working surprisingly well."

According to Savchuk, many modders have already gravitated toward Frontier's design language of their own accord, picking fonts, colors, and UI elements that compliment the ones already in the game. And when push comes to shove, the team's priority is making sure Frontier's fiction encourages player expression, rather than disciplining that player base to fall in line with a set tone or aesthetic.

"I think we are striking that balance right now, between building out something intentional, but also leaving enough negative space for the players to step in and build out their own stuff," said Savchuk. "The invisible part of this iceberg is structured in a way that, if worse comes to worse, it allows us to build it a little bit and adjust to evolve the world in a direction that the players are evolving, because eventually it's going to be just on them. It's an evergreen balance to be fighting for, but we're very conscious about it."

But what about that goofiness factor? EVE Frontier community developer Ben Sisson explained to me that it's baked into the fiction of the game. Even more than OG EVE Online, Frontier is embracing themes of transhumanism and a sort of mind-body duality. Your consciousness haunts cloned bodies or "shells" that pilot your ships, and the shells are a piece of equipment to be traded, upgraded, or sacrificed as needed.

The origins of the inhabiting consciousnesses, though, are a key mystery of Frontier's worldbuilding. Wherever they came from, Sisson posited, they had access to some corpus of human art and experience, the equivalent of a cached, offline copy of Wikipedia for the post-post-human set.

"There's no life there, and yet the [modders] have created apps for their structures that have cats in them," said Sisson. "Now, where in the world did that come from? Is that a memory that was left in there somewhere? Every bit of that comes from the question of where these souls come from before they got put into these bodies and woken up.

"It is an easy thing to do when you build the answer to the question into the lore of the game. All of that stuff exists because it came from the people inside the game."

As we spoke, I was also struck by the parallel with EVE Online. It often gets left by the wayside in discussions of EVE's impact, but its emergent player sagas are undergirded by a visually striking and well-fleshed out sci-fi fiction. EVE Online never had Frontier's modding permissiveness, but it's been balancing serious lore with players getting goofy for over 20 years.

"The game that we're trying to build is one where we're saying, 'That all exists,'" said Frontier development director David Bowman. "Everything's canon. If it exists in the game, it's because somebody in that universe came up with it. Now, where they got those ideas, who knows?

"There probably aren't any cats in the Frontier, if I was going to guess. And yet…"

EVE Frontier's latest cycle went live on June 25, commencing an ambitious move toward fully modular ship building, rather than the set models of EVE Online. Cycle 6 also introduces an updated new player experience alongside a five-day free trial . Coupled with game-changing gamepad controls , it's one of the best times yet to check out the in-progress survival MMO.

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