SpudCell: First Synthetic Cell With a Complete Life Cycle

For the first time, a synthetic cell built entirely from non-living chemical components has run a complete life cycle on its own. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, working with colleagues across other institutions, posted a preprint on July 1, 2026, describing a cell-like system they call SpudCell that feeds, grows, copies its genome, divides, and competes with neighboring cells across multiple generations, all without borrowing any machinery from a living organism.

The team, led by Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart of the College of Biological Sciences, frames SpudCell as a proof of concept rather than a finished organism. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology,” Adamala said in the institution’s announcement on SpudCell. “It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

The Cell That Runs a Full Cycle

SpudCell is built bottom-up, part by part, from individual molecules rather than carved down from an existing cell. The system contains 36 purified enzymes drawn from E. coli bacteria, plus a 90,000-base-pair genome split across seven DNA plasmids and packaged inside a lipid sphere called a liposome, the same basic shell that wraps natural cell membranes. Together those pieces perform the full set of behaviors biologists use to distinguish living things from inert chemistry: feeding, growth, genome replication, and division.

The feeding step is the cell’s signature move: SpudCell makes a protein called α-hemolysin from its own DNA, the protein inserts itself through the cell’s outer membrane and latches onto matching hooks on small feeder liposomes floating outside, then triggers the two vesicles to fuse. Inside those feeders come lipids for membrane growth plus the ribosomes, enzymes, and small molecules the synthetic cell needs to keep running.

Once fed, SpudCell grows, copies its seven DNA plasmids, and eventually divides. Because the genome directly controls both feeding and division, the cell’s DNA links genotype to phenotype in a way earlier synthetic systems could not. Cells with a particular genetic change grow faster and divide more often, and that variant spreads through a culture over generations.

A Genome Below the Theoretical Minimum

The SpudCell genome sits at 90,000 base pairs, distributed across seven small DNA plasmids instead of a single chromosome. For context, a human genome runs to roughly three million kilobase pairs, and E. coli carries 4.6 million base pairs. Prior analysis had speculated that a minimal living cell might need as many as 113,000 base pairs. SpudCell slips under that theoretical floor by feeding externally rather than running its own metabolism, which removes the hundreds of genes that natural cells spend on harvesting energy.

How that architecture compares with what nature builds:

The PURE (Protein Synthesis Using Recombinant Elements) system handles the actual protein-making inside the liposome. Every component and concentration is known, which is what lets the researchers call SpudCell fully chemically defined. Natural cells are not defined this way; even the smallest known self-replicating cell at the Venter Institute, with 473 genes, contained 149 genes whose function scientists had not pinned down when it was first reported.

Division Without Scaffolding

Natural cells divide with the help of a cytoskeleton, an internal scaffold of dozens of proteins working in coordinated fashion to pull chromosomes apart and pinch the membrane in two. Building that scaffold from scratch has been the bottleneck in synthetic cell research for years, and the Minnesota team skipped it entirely.

SpudCell divides by protein crowding. After the cell has grown past a certain size, proteins accumulate on the inner surface of the membrane until the physical stress forces the lipid shell to split. Cells that make more of the relevant surface protein divide more efficiently, which is what allows genetic changes to translate directly into reproductive success.

Adamala’s team showed that a variant engineered to overproduce the fusion protein outcompeted the original strain over five generations, and the gap widened under nutrient scarcity. Selection was running inside a fully synthetic chemical system. The synthetic cell population, in effect, had started evolving along engineered lines.

SpudCell’s mechanism couples genotype to phenotype in a way earlier synthetic systems could not achieve. Because the genome directly controls how much of the dividing protein the cell makes, faster-feeding variants literally produce more of themselves.

Five Generations, 150 Molecules, and a Lot of Liposomes

SpudCell is not yet what anyone would call a self-sustaining organism. The system runs for 5 to 10 generations before its borrowed ribosomes degrade, and the team has to feed it manually at each step. Adamala described it to CNN as “an incredibly wimpy organism that right now basically does nothing other than to eat and occasionally make a daughter cell.” Each generation takes roughly 12 hours at 30°C (86°F). E. coli, by comparison, divides every 30 minutes.

The geometry of division is also lossy. After five generations only about 30 percent of daughter cells still carry the complete set of seven DNA plasmids, because SpudCell lacks the cytoskeletal machinery that natural cells use to pull chromosomes apart evenly during division. Out of roughly 150 to 200 distinct molecules in the system, the loss of even one essential plasmid is fatal for that lineage. Each round of feeding requires manual preparation, and streptavidin and molecular linker proteins are supplied from outside to trigger division.

Three challenges stand between SpudCell today and a usable engineering chassis, according to Biotic’s full breakdown of SpudCell’s architecture:

• Building ribosomes from genetic instructions. SpudCell currently uses ribosomes harvested from E. coli; without the capability to remake its own ribosomes, the system runs down after 5 to 10 generations.
• Improving genome distribution. With no cytoskeleton to pull chromosomes apart, only about 30 percent of daughter cells inherit the complete set of plasmids after five generations.
• Reducing dependence on external feeding. Nutrient-carrying liposomes have to be added regularly, and division requires streptavidin and molecular linker proteins supplied from outside.

Biotic and the Open-Source Bet

Alongside the paper, Adamala and three cofounders are launching Biotic, a public-benefit research and engineering institution built to keep SpudCell’s core technology open. Its cofounders are Adamala; Drew Endy, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University; Jan Jedryszek; and biotech entrepreneur Chris Raggio. The licensing model is borrowed from open-source software: academics and nonprofits will use the platform free, while commercial users will pay licensing fees.

The ambition, as Adamala put it, is to “gather the international community to actually speedrun the development for it to become useful.” The alternative, in her framing, is that every lab in the field solves the same handful of problems in isolation, with little institutional knowledge carrying forward. In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Endy described the moment he first saw Adamala’s results. That was at the Build-a-Cell workshop at Stanford in the spring of 2025.

It was, for me, like seeing the Earth for the first time from outer space. Cellrise, in place of Earthrise.

Drew Endy, Biotic co-founder and associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in a group interview with the Biotic cofounders.

A provisional patent application has been filed on the underlying technology, according to the SpudCell research paper preprint on bioRxiv. Funding for the project came from the John Templeton Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

How This Differs From Venter’s Cells

SpudCell is not the first synthetic cell scientists have built. The Venter Institute has reported a minimal cell with 473 genes, the smallest genome of any self-replicating organism known at the time. Those cells were top-down: scientists took an existing bacterium, stripped it back to a minimal genome, and inserted synthetic DNA.

SpudCell is built from scratch. Every molecule in the system was purified and placed there by hand; nothing came from a living donor. That distinction matters because SpudCell carries no evolutionary baggage and inherits no unknown functions. In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Adamala wrote: “When the Venter Institute’s minimal cell was first reported, the functions of 149 of its 473 genes were unknown. You cannot cleanly ask what one part does when so much of the rest is a black box. SpudCell has no black box; every input is a known, adjustable parameter.”

The trade-off is that no black box comes with its own costs. Stripping out metabolism and the cytoskeleton also strips out the parts of a cell that make it self-sustaining. The cell that emerges is fragile, and engineering it into a stable chassis is the work the field is now signing up to do.

Is It Alive?

Scientists inside and outside the project do not agree on whether SpudCell qualifies as living. Adamala is direct: “I do not. We constructed it. We did not create it, and we do not claim to have built life.” Endy, a Biotic co-founder who did not run the lab work, draws the same line.

I would say Kate has constructed a cell. I don’t think she’s created life.

Drew Endy, Biotic co-founder and Stanford bioengineering professor, in a Hoover Institution interview.

Outside reviewers were more measured. Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, called the work “probably the biggest breakthrough in recent times in the synthetic cell field.” Yuval Elani, an associate professor in biochemical technologies at Imperial College London, called the work “a genuine milestone on the road toward” the question of whether life can be assembled from chemistry. Elizabeth Strychalski, a group leader at NIST’s National Cellular Engineering Group, called the research “important and impressive” and said it would be “tremendously useful.” A separate scientist, Chenli Liu of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, declined to assess the work before peer-reviewed publication.

Why an Engineering Discipline, Not a Finished Cell

The paper’s own abstract calls SpudCell “sufficiently encouraging to support routinization of synthetic cell engineering workflows,” which is a quieter claim than a working synthetic organism. The team is betting that what is now a difficult, lab-by-lab craft can become, with shared standards and shared parts, something closer to an engineering discipline, the way open hardware and open-source software built foundations that other teams now build on.

Endy used a Wright brothers analogy in his Hoover Institution interview, calling SpudCell the first flyer for synthetic biology, missing wheels, Wi-Fi, and a bathroom. Adamala used the Sputnik analogy to name the cell in the first place, with the play on the Russian satellite that opened the space age in the late 1950s. A provisional patent covers the underlying technology. The open architecture is Biotic’s job to maintain.

Other labs are already racing to extend SpudCell into a general-purpose chassis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SpudCell?

SpudCell is a cell-like system built by researchers at the University of Minnesota from purified, non-living chemical components. It is the first such system to run a complete cell cycle on its own, performing feeding, growth, genome replication, and division across multiple generations. The project is led by Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart of the College of Biological Sciences.

How big is SpudCell’s genome?

SpudCell’s genome is 90,000 base pairs long, distributed across seven separate DNA plasmids. That is smaller than the 113,000-base-pair theoretical minimum biologists had estimated for a minimal living cell. For comparison, E. coli’s genome is 4.6 million base pairs.

Who built SpudCell?

A team led by Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart of the University of Minnesota, with Nathaniel J. Gaut, Christopher Deich, Brock Cash, and Tanner Hoog as co-authors. Funding came from the John Templeton Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The paper was posted as a preprint on bioRxiv on July 1, 2026.

Is SpudCell alive?

The researchers behind SpudCell say no. Adamala has stated that the team did not create life and does not claim to have done so. Drew Endy, a Biotic co-founder, has drawn the same line. Outside scientists have called the work a major breakthrough without taking a position on the life question.

What is Biotic?

Biotic is a public-benefit research and engineering institution launching alongside the SpudCell paper. Its cofounders are Kate Adamala, Drew Endy of Stanford, Jan Jedryszek, and biotech entrepreneur Chris Raggio. Biotic will license SpudCell technology free to academic and nonprofit users; commercial users will pay licensing fees.