A team of scientists from the University of Minnesota has created SpudCell, a cellular system consisting entirely of known chemical components that can undergo a complete cell cycle, according to research published by Biotic. A revolutionary discovery has shown that the basic processes of life can be recreated from non-living components, scientists say.
SpudCell can grow by attaching itself to small beads of nutrients created in a lab. These globules fuse with the cell, and the cell uses their contents to grow. A cell's DNA is controlled and this determines how fast it grows and how big it becomes.
In natural cells, division occurs thanks to the internal framework – the cytoskeleton, but synthetic cells do not have it. Instead, proteins on the surface of its membrane, or membrane, accumulate until it ruptures, and the cell divides. Moreover, scientists changed SpudCell's DNA so that it produced more protein for division, and cells with this change began to grow faster and reproduce more successfully. After just five generations, these cells completely replaced the original ones.
The SpudCell genome consists of 90,000 base pairs, which the researchers divided into 9 small parts called plasmids. This makes it easy to change individual parts of the cell. Unlike natural cells, in synthetic cells everything is known exactly about each protein and its quantity, which made it possible to create a special mixture of 36 purified proteins for the production of new ones.
It is these that SpudCell feeds on, producing them independently. The synthesized particle itself consists of fat molecules similar to those that form the membrane of ordinary cells. Inside this shell is DNA with reproducible proteins.
Study co-author Kate Adamala, an assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said the synthesized cell could eventually help solve some of the most challenging problems in medicine and bioengineering.
“This is perhaps the most exciting project I have ever worked on. We have reproduced in chemistry what was previously only possible in biology: the full range of cell functions. This proves that the most fundamental functions of life, such as growth and replication, do not require a mysterious magical spark,” Adamala said.
At the same time, despite the advantages over natural cells, synthetic cells have a number of problems. For example, SpudCell uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria, but it cannot create them itself. Therefore, it exists for 5-10 generations, after which the mechanism degenerates, and to create ribosomes, the synthesis of dozens of proteins and RNA molecules is necessary, and then their assembly in the correct order.
The improved genome also does not propagate after five generations because it does not have the cytoskeleton that solves this problem in natural cells, and SpudCell is extremely dependent on external nutrition and cannot exist autonomously.
It is for all these reasons that scientists note the large amount of work required for the further development of the cell they created. To this end, Biotic was launched, a research and engineering institution aimed at creating a common technical infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering and enabling the participation of researchers from around the world.
