Artificial cell can feed, grow, and split—briefly

SpudCells feed, – Researchers built SpudCells—artificial cells that can keep making proteins after initial supplies run out by “feeding” them through a second, membrane-encased delivery system. In a limited, engineered setup they also made the cells grow and mimic division, spl

A tiny artificial cell was made to do something surprisingly life-like: keep working after its first meal, swell in size, and—under carefully forced conditions—split as if it were dividing.

The starting problem was basic chemistry with huge biological implications. The researchers found that the complex set of proteins needed to build more proteins couldn’t simply pass through a small pore. So they changed the route. Instead of trying to move everything through that restriction. they encased the proteins and other large materials inside a different membrane. then fed those membrane-wrapped materials to SpudCells.

Getting the two membranes to communicate took its own engineering step. To make the interior of the SpudCell receive the contents, the team already had a pore protein in use. They added a tag to that pore protein. then added something that could interact with that tag to the food membrane. That molecular handshake let the two membranes interact long enough to fuse—spilling the “food” into the SpudCell’s interior and bringing additional membrane material along with it.

Once that feeding process worked, it did more than refill. The SpudCells could continue making new proteins even after they would have exhausted their initial supply of raw materials. And because the fused material included extra membrane, the SpudCells didn’t just stay alive—they grew. The added membrane material increased their size, literally causing it to grow.

Under normal biology, growth eventually brings cell division—membranes split and the contents are apportioned into new cells. The SpudCells, however, didn’t have a built-in mechanism to make that split happen. At first. the researchers took a blunt approach: they passed the artificial cells through a wire grid and applied physical force to cause the membranes to split.

Later, they moved toward something closer to a biological trigger. They developed a system intended to make the pore proteins clump. This was done by adding certain chemicals to the solution. Those chemicals altered the membrane’s shape, and eventually parts of it budded off. The team described that budding as a far more random process, but in outcome it approximated cell division.

The work, in a limited but carefully engineered sense, allowed these “cells” to feed, grow, and divide—powered by proteins encoded by their own genome. The researchers also tracked the genetic continuity across generations, and that’s where the experiment hits a hard limit.

The genome was only distributed into the next generation of cells at random. Over each generation, pieces of it were progressively lost. Because of that compounding loss, no SpudCells were taken past five generations in this work.

There’s a stark sequence in those constraints. The artificial system could borrow biology’s steps—protein production. membrane-based feeding. growth. and a division-like split—but it still struggled with one of the most reliable biological features: preserving the genetic instructions intact from one generation to the next. After five generations, that missing reliability becomes the deciding factor, stopping the lineage in its tracks.

artificial cell SpudCells membrane fusion protein synthesis cell division synthetic biology genome loss