Associate professor Kate Adamala has been busy. Her lab at the University of Minnesota takes chemicals and dead, isolated biological parts — like DNA, membranes, ribosomes — and puts them together into “synthetic” cells to see if they will come to life…or at least act alive.
This summer, Adamala’s lab had a tremendous breakthrough. They made synthetic cells that can feed, grow, and divide. She decided to name them SpudCells, and says that they prove that one day building a fully living lab-made cell will be possible.
Adamala’s dream, and the dream of other synthetic biologists like her, is to make all the medicine, materials, and fuel we need with synthetic cells like these. Instead of relying endlessly on petrochemicals, Adamala believes we could program cells to generate these materials in a lab for a more self-reliant and renewable future.
As Adamala explains: “I live in the Midwest, so we’ve got a lot of prairie grass. Why can’t I take that prairie grass and ferment it into a plastic toy? It’s totally possible. The atoms are there. We just…don’t have a living organism that would be willing and able to do that.” The synthetic cell could eventually be that organism.
Living cells can move atoms around with pinpoint precision without creating a lot of toxic waste along the way. The only problem is that natural biological cells are too hard to control.
Scientists still don’t actually understand how natural cells do everything they can do. “I’m scared of cells,” Adamala says. “I don’t believe that we’ll ever be able to understand a complex living cell. So my approach is I think we can build ourselves a cell.”
For Unexplainable’s three-part Life From Scratch series, I spoke with some of the leading voices of synthetic cell biology. From making the world’s first living cell with synthetic DNA to racing to build safeguards against a technology that could kill the world, this series explores the potential promise and scary risks of synthetic cell biology.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Adamala about her lab’s big breakthrough, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast — and the whole series — so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also watch a video version of this conversation on Netflix.
What’s the big research that you shared with the public this summer?
We made a cell that can feed, grow, and divide out of nonliving, chemical components. People have been making cells from dead chemicals for a long time now, but none of them were able to realize those key functions of life. This is the first time synthetic cells have been able to grow and replicate based on their own instructions.
Before, we could make a synthetic cell and tell it to grow by adding things to it, but the SpudCells grow because they feel like it, because the proteins inside them tell them to grow.
So it can grow, it can eat, and it can divide. Are they alive?
I don’t think they’re alive. Even though they do all those functions that we think only life does, they’re not doing any of it very well.
They have to be fed pretty much every building block that they need. Life needs to figure out how to survive, and the cells that we made, even if on the surface level they look like they fulfill the functions of life, there is no robustness in there. If the conditions are not absolutely perfect, they will just stop.
This seems like it should be a simple question, but from our conversation, I get the sense that maybe it’s a little bit more complicated than it seems. What makes something alive?
That’s a very good question, and I think the best answer I can give is a quote from US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. He said, “I will know it when I see it.” It’s not a scientific definition, but there is no good scientific definition of life.
There is a NASA definition of life that NASA has been using when they look for life in the universe, and that definition says “a self-replicating chemical system that’s capable of Darwinian evolution.”
And according to the NASA definition of life, you’re dead and I’m dead because I’m not self-replicating. For me to replicate, I need my husband. So that just shows you that definitions of life are very inaccurate, very context-dependent.
There’s just not a good definition of life that would cover everything that we instinctively consider alive, and exclude everything that we would all agree is not alive. Everyone defines life according to some different principles.
Why call these cells SpudCells?
We wanted to invoke Sputnik. It was the first artificial satellite, and it was actually a pretty bad satellite — it didn’t really do any of the things that fancy modern satellites do — but it basically opened up the Space Age.
It showed people that it’s possible to escape the gravity well. If we can put a satellite in orbit, maybe we can put people in orbit. And if we can put people in orbit, maybe we can escape orbit, go to the moon, and then go past the moon. It showed what’s possible. And that’s how I see the role of a SpudCell.
So it’s almost like a proof of concept?
Exactly. It’s a proof of concept that you can put chemicals together into a cell. By itself, it’s not a really good organism, but will hopefully show people that you can put together chemicals into something that can grow, divide, undergo selection, and that opens up this age of biology to me.
How do these SpudCells do all of these things differently than a natural cell?
The process of eating is very similar to how bacteria and other simple cells eat. So when they see something edible that’s pretty big, they will just kind of take it in. And that’s what SpudCell does.
Sort of like two soap bubbles joining together?
Exactly. Two soap bubbles, one of them is bigger, one of them is smaller, and they join together, and the smaller one brings in the food.
The division though, that’s a different story. The division is actually very different from how natural cells divide. The spud is genetically encoded, so the genome of the cell directs making the proteins. And if there’s enough proteins on a membrane, the cell starts dividing.
Does it feel like you’ve reached a milestone with this project?
Definitely. It’s a huge milestone because it shows us it’s possible.
Check out the other episodes from the series below: