@Phoenixyin13: Breaking! This is the latest major breakthrough in synthetic biology, confirmed by The New York Times in a front-page story. A team led by University of Minnesota scientist Kate Adamala has used non-living chemical components to assemble, from scratch, a brand-new cell—SpudCell. In the past, gene editing was like buying a ready-made car and swapping a tire or upgrading the engine. Now, scientists have essentially gone to the parts factory, bought iron, rubber, circuits, and assembled from the ground up a prototype of artificial life that can refuel itself, run, and self-replicate.

Latest! This is a major breakthrough in synthetic biology just confirmed by The New York Times in its headline.

A team of scientists from the University of Minnesota, led by Kate Adamala, has built a brand-new cell from scratch using non-living chemical components — SpudCell.

In the past, gene editing was more like buying a ready-made car and swapping a tire or upgrading the engine. This time, it’s as if scientists went to the parts factory, bought iron blocks, rubber, and circuits, and assembled from the ground up an artificial life prototype that can fuel itself, move on its own, and replicate.

When this purely synthetic cell was placed in a petri dish, it actively engulfed nutrient bubbles, grew, and expanded. Even more astonishing: after feeding, without any external intervention, it bent and split into two daughter cells on its own, and those offspring continued to grow. It also showed rudimentary natural selection, with mutants outcompeting others in the population.

Humans have about 20,000 genes; E. coli has about 4,000. SpudCell uses a minimalist genome, with a core of just a few dozen key genes, to achieve the essential functions of life — feeding, growth, reproduction, and competition.

Of course, it’s not yet a fully independent life form. It currently requires manual supplementation of some components and can only be maintained for a limited number of generations.

But this is already a landmark proof: Life is no longer a completely mysterious, uncontrollable natural phenomenon. Life is a precise chemical system that humans can design, assemble, and tune.

From today onward, the creator-level power of synthetic biology has taken another giant leap forward. Humanity continues to explore.

In the future, we can customize these highly obedient cell factories to produce life-saving drugs around the clock, break down pollutants, or design versions adapted to extreme environments — send them to Mars to absorb CO₂, terraform the atmosphere, or even become biological partners in humanity’s interstellar exploration.

Nature took 3.8 billion years to evolve life. We are accelerating it all with engineering. The age of synthetic biology has just begun.

The New York Times (@nytimes): Breaking News: For the first time, researchers have created a cell with most of the hallmarks of life.