For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides
Ada Zejun Shen/ Quanta Magazine
沉泽君/广达杂志
For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.
生物学家第一次将非生命成分一块一块地装入类似细胞的膜中，并见证了分子袋开始表现出生命的样子。
The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle.
实验室制造的合成细胞生长、复制其 DNA 并分裂，展示了细胞周期的基本功能。
It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak , who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research.
这是“令人印象深刻的一步”，在芝加哥大学研究生命起源的杰克·绍斯塔克（Jack Szostak）说，他没有参与这项研究。
“I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
“到目前为止，我不知道还有任何其他利用生物成分组装人造细胞的努力取得了进展。”
The cell is not alive by any definition.
从任何定义来看，细胞都不是活的。
It can’t survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery needed to make proteins.
如果没有持续供应食物和核糖体（制造蛋白质所需的机器），它就无法生存。
It has no defenses or a good waste removal system.
它没有防御措施或良好的废物清除系统。
But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife, a goal that synthetic biologists have been chasing for decades.
但这是迄今为止最有力的证明，证明从非生命中产生生命是可能的，这是合成生物学家几十年来一直追求的目标。
“It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto , a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work.
荷兰斯特拉廷化学研究所的系统化学家西布伦·奥托（Sijbren Otto）没有参与这项工作，他说：“这是朝着用死亡成分制造生命这一圣杯迈出的一大步。”
“It’s not completely there yet, but it’s definitely getting quite close.”
“虽然还没有完全实现，但肯定已经非常接近了。”
Since these cells were pieced together from scratch, and all the molecular parts were crafted in the lab, scientists can tinker with the system and switch components in and out.
由于这些细胞是从头开始拼凑在一起的，并且所有分子部分都是在实验室中制作的，因此科学家可以修补系统并切换组件。
“I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component,” said Kate Adamala , a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota who led the new study, which is not yet peer-reviewed; the paper was posted on the scientific preprint site biorxiv.org on July 2.
领导这项新研究的明尼苏达大学合成生物学家凯特·阿达玛拉 (Kate Adamala) 说：“我有一个蓝图，有每个成分的完整化学成分清单。”该研究尚未经过同行评审。该论文于 7 月 2 日发布在科学预印本网站 biorxiv.org 上。
With such flexibility, this kind of synthetic cell could eventually be coaxed to create new materials, such as biofuels and drugs, and help researchers study disease.
凭借这种灵活性，这种合成细胞最终可以被用来创造新材料，例如生物燃料和药物，并帮助研究人员研究疾病。
The synthetic biologist Kate Adamala coaxed a cellular soup of nonliving biomolecules enclosed in a membrane to act somewhat like a living thing, even growing and dividing into daughter cells.
合成生物学家凯特·阿达玛拉（Kate Adamala）诱导了一种由非生命生物分子组成的细胞汤，包裹在膜中，使其表现得有点像生物，甚至生长并分裂成子细胞。
It could also give scientists insight into some of their deepest existential questions: What is the minimum needed to sustain life?
它还可以让科学家深入了解一些最深刻的存在问题：维持生命所需的最低限度是多少？
How could life start?
生命如何开始？
What happens if we alter the biology that composes life on Earth today?
如果我们改变构成当今地球生命的生物学，会发生什么？
Or, as Adamala put it: “What else can biology do?”
或者，正如阿达玛拉所说：“生物学还能做什么？”
Some 4 billion years ago, a bunch of nonliving molecules got together to form the first protocells.
大约 40 亿年前，一群非生命分子聚集在一起形成了第一个原始细胞。
They fed, grew, and divided.
它们进食、生长、分裂。
Then, over time, evolutionary processes emerged that let these cells change and diversify into many different types, decorating a barren world with all manner of strange beings.
然后，随着时间的推移，进化过程出现，让这些细胞发生变化并多样化为许多不同的类型，用各种奇怪的生物装饰着一个贫瘠的世界。
A purely chemical world blossomed into a biological one.
一个纯粹的化学世界发展成为一个生物世界。
Scientists cannot agree on how this shift from nonlife to life, or abiogenesis, happened, but some have turned their sights on trying it out for themselves in the lab.
对于这种从非生命到生命的转变或自然发生是如何发生的，科学家们无法达成一致，但有些人已经将目光转向在实验室中亲自尝试。
For decades, researchers have taken different approaches to this challenge.
几十年来，研究人员采取了不同的方法来应对这一挑战。
Some, like the synthetic biologist John Glass at the J.
有些人，比如 J.
Craig Venter Institute, are stripping down bacterial cells to their smallest, barest genomes to reveal a cell’s minimum requirements to stay alive.
克雷格文特尔研究所正在将细菌细胞剥离到最小、最简单的基因组，以揭示细胞生存的最低要求。
Others, like Otto, try to build cells with molecules that differ from those found in Earth biology.
其他人，比如奥托，试图用与地球生物学中发现的分子不同的分子来构建细胞。
Adamala also works from the ground up, but with biological molecules found in nature today.
阿达玛拉也从头开始工作，但使用的是当今自然界中发现的生物分子。
When she started her lab in 2016, she envisioned assembling a synthetic cell, a proof of concept, that could undergo a complete cycle of cell division using its own genome.
当她在 2016 年开始建立自己的实验室时，她设想组装一个合成细胞，作为概念验证，该细胞可以使用自己的基因组进行完整的细胞分裂周期。
She found an instruction manual in what all known cells have in common: They grow, they duplicate their DNA, they divide, and they evolve.
她找到了所有已知细胞的共同点的指导手册：它们生长、它们复制它们的DNA、它们分裂和它们进化。
They transcribe their DNA into RNA and then make proteins to carry out these tasks and others that keep a cell running, such as metabolizing molecules for energy.
它们将 DNA 转录为 RNA，然后制造蛋白质来执行这些任务以及其他保持细胞运行的任务，例如代谢分子获取能量。
All of this is done inside a lipid membrane, which holds all the necessary materials in one place.
所有这些都是在脂质膜内完成的，脂质膜将所有必要的材料固定在一个地方。
Adamala’s team needed to build their synthetic cell a genome and supply it with all the materials to carry out those tasks.
阿达玛拉的团队需要构建他们的合成细胞基因组，并为其提供执行这些任务的所有材料。
They developed and optimized different ingredients, most inspired by other labs, before combining them together inside liposomes — hollow sacs enclosed by a simple lipid membrane.
他们开发并优化了不同的成分，大部分灵感来自于其他实验室，然后将它们组合在脂质体（由简单的脂质膜包围的空心囊）内。
This would serve as the cellular body.
这将作为细胞体。
A purely chemical world blossomed into a biological one.
一个纯粹的化学世界发展成为一个生物世界。
They started with a cell’s most fundamental system: its mechanism for copying its DNA and passing it down to daughter cells.
他们从细胞最基本的系统开始：复制 DNA 并将其传递给子细胞的机制。
They adopted a DNA replication system , pioneered by the synthetic biologists Hannes Mutschler and Christophe Danelon , and tweaked it to work alongside other systems, including a commercial pack of 36 enzymes that let the cell read DNA and make proteins.
他们采用了合成生物学家 Hannes Mutschler 和 Christophe Danelon 首创的 DNA 复制系统，并对其进行了调整，使其与其他系统一起工作，其中包括 36 种酶的商业包，可以让细胞读取 DNA 并制造蛋白质。
Adamala’s team fiddled with their cellular brew, switching genes in and out and adjusting concentrations of various molecules, to get the crucial information-carrying and protein-making genetic systems to jibe.
阿达马拉的团队摆弄了他们的细胞酿造，切换基因并调整各种分子的浓度，以使关键的信息携带和蛋白质制造遗传系统发挥作用。
Their tiny synthetic genome did not encode any metabolic genes, which would let the cell process food and energy, or many of the complex molecules a cell needs.
它们微小的合成基因组不编码任何代谢基因，而代谢基因可以让细胞处理食物和能量，或细胞所需的许多复杂分子。
So, in parallel, the researchers prepped some supply packs.
因此，与此同时，研究人员准备了一些补给包。
They filled other liposomes with sugar, lipids, and enzymes, as well as complex molecules, such as transfer RNA (tRNA) and ribosomes, which work together to translate genetic instructions into proteins.
他们在其他脂质体中填充了糖、脂质和酶，以及复杂的分子，例如转移 RNA (tRNA) 和核糖体，它们共同作用将遗传指令翻译成蛋白质。
For their protocell to accept these crucial supplies, the team also modified a protein that would sit in the cell membrane and attract the lipid bubbles.
为了让他们的原始细胞接受这些重要的供应，研究小组还修改了一种位于细胞膜上并吸引脂质气泡的蛋白质。
When a bubble bumped into the cell, their membranes would fuse, releasing the supplies inside.
当气泡撞击细胞时，它们的膜会融合，释放出内部的物质。
It wasn’t easy to get all these genetic systems to work together successfully.
让所有这些遗传系统成功地协同工作并不容易。
After some more tweaking and optimizing, the cell started growing and replicating its DNA.
经过更多调整和优化后，细胞开始生长并复制其 DNA。
“I was almost ready to say ‘Done’ and ‘We’re going to publish it,’” Adamala recalled.
“我几乎准备好说‘完成’和‘我们要发布它’，”阿达玛拉回忆道。
But her vision for a synthetic cell had one more step: division.
但她对合成细胞的愿景还有一步：分裂。
Fluorescent microscopy shows a synthetic cell undergoing cell division: elongating, pinching, and separating into two daughter cells.
荧光显微镜显示合成细胞正在经历细胞分裂：拉长、收缩并分离成两个子细胞。
This was where the field had been stuck for some time.
这就是该领域已经停滞了一段时间的地方。
Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA.
阿达玛拉之前的研究人员已经找到了喂养和培养合成细胞以及复制其 DNA 的不同方法。
But cell division is a different beast.
但细胞分裂是另一回事。
A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split.
典型的细胞会重组其细胞骨架（一种提供结构支持的蛋白质纤维网络），将其 DNA 减半并分裂。
Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to undergo this complex process.
合成生物学家无法弄清楚如何让他们的细胞经历这个复杂的过程。
So Adamala decided to ditch the cytoskeleton.
因此，阿达马拉决定放弃细胞骨架。
One day, while tearing through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in a paper .
有一天，她翻阅文献时，在一篇论文中发现了一个有趣的机制。
By attaching protein tags to a cell membrane, the synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowsky at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to crowd around and physically bend the membrane, forcing the cell to divide.
马克斯·普朗克胶体与界面研究所的合成生物学家莱因哈德·利波斯基（Reinhard Lipowsky）通过将蛋白质标签附着在细胞膜上，吸引其他蛋白质聚集在细胞膜周围并物理弯曲细胞膜，迫使细胞分裂。
Following this approach, Adamala tweaked a cell-membrane protein and tested it in her protocells.
按照这种方法，阿达玛拉调整了一种细胞膜蛋白，并在她的原始细胞中进行了测试。
After several tries, it worked.
经过几次尝试，成功了。
“I wasn’t allowing myself to believe it for a while,” she said.
“有一段时间我不允许自己相信这一点，”她说。
“It was like, ‘Holy shit, did I actually make a dividing cell?’ …
“这就像，‘天啊，我真的制造了一个分裂细胞吗？’......
At some point, you’ve been checking enough that [you think], ‘OK, now it’s real.’”
在某些时候，你已经检查得足够多了，[你想]，‘好吧，现在它是真的了。’”
This paper “beautifully demonstrates this division mechanism,” said Job Boekhoven , a systems chemist at the Technical University of Munich who was not involved in the study.
未参与这项研究的慕尼黑工业大学系统化学家 Job Boekhoven 表示，这篇论文“完美地展示了这种分裂机制”。
“That has been a huge achievement.”
“这是一项巨大的成就。”
By putting together systems inspired by different labs — DNA replication; feeder liposomes; and swarming, division-inducing proteins — and then optimizing them to work together, Adamala’s team showed that it is possible to induce the chemical world to form a biological one in the lab.
通过将受不同实验室启发的系统组合在一起——DNA复制；饲养脂质体；阿达玛拉的团队表明，在实验室中诱导化学世界形成生物世界是可能的。
“Combining all of these things is a staggering technical accomplishment,” Glass said.
“将所有这些东西结合起来是一项令人震惊的技术成就，”格拉斯说。
“I think it will prove to be a watershed event for the synthetic-cell field and biology in general.”
“我认为这将被证明是合成细胞领域和整个生物学的分水岭事件。”
Michael Lynch , an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University who was also not involved in the study, agreed.
亚利桑那州立大学的进化生物学家迈克尔·林奇也没有参与这项研究，他对此表示同意。
It is “a synthetic biology tour de force,” he said.
他说，这是“合成生物学的杰作”。
However, he also cautioned against over-hyping the cell since it’s not yet self-sustaining.
然而，他也警告不要过度炒作该电池，因为它尚未自我维持。
I think it will prove to be a watershed event for the synthetic-cell field and biology in general.
我认为这将被证明是合成细胞领域和整个生物学的分水岭事件。
John Glass, J.
约翰·格拉斯，J.
Craig Venter Institute
克雷格文特尔研究所
Once the synthetic cells were created, her students and others started calling them Adamala cells — a moniker she hated.
一旦合成细胞被创造出来，她的学生和其他人就开始称它们为阿达玛拉细胞——她讨厌这个绰号。
She insisted that they name the cells after anything else, jokingly suggesting potatoes.
她坚持要求他们以其他名字来命名这些细胞，并开玩笑地建议用土豆来命名。
So her students started calling them spudcells.
所以她的学生开始称它们为 spudcell。
“I’m Polish, I’m mostly made of potatoes, so that’s fine with me,” Adamala said.
“我是波兰人，我主要是用土豆做的，所以这对我来说没问题，”阿达玛拉说。
Each cell is tiny.
每个细胞都很小。
Its genome is way smaller than bacterial genomes, and it doesn’t look like anything special.
它的基因组比细菌基因组小得多，而且看起来也没什么特别的。
It’s “beautiful to me because I’m super excited about it,” Adamala said.
阿达玛拉说，这“对我来说很美丽，因为我对此感到非常兴奋”。
“But if you look at it under the microscope, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s a blob.’”
“但如果你在显微镜下观察它，就会发现，‘好吧，这是一个斑点。’”
The cell could grow and divide.
细胞可以生长和分裂。
But could it take the next step toward life by evolving?
但它能通过进化迈向生命的下一步吗？
The researchers started fiddling with the synthetic cell’s DNA to see if they could get some cells to grow larger or divide faster — in effect, creating genetic variation in the cell population.
研究人员开始摆弄合成细胞的 DNA，看看是否能让一些细胞变得更大或分裂得更快——实际上，在细胞群中产生遗传变异。
They found that the cells that grew bigger also had more daughter cells and started to become more populous.
他们发现，变大的细胞也有更多的子细胞，并且数量开始增多。
In other words, those traits started being selected for within the population, the first step toward evolution.
换句话说，这些特征开始在人群中被选择，这是进化的第一步。
What Adamala’s team demonstrated was not quite natural selection, the primary mechanism that drives evolutionary change, in which organisms that are better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive.
阿达玛拉团队所证明的并不完全是自然选择，自然选择是推动进化变化的主要机制，在这种机制中，更好地适应环境的生物体更有可能生存。
Even if she got their cell to produce more daughter cells, she doesn’t think it would lead to evolution.
即使她让它们的细胞产生更多的子细胞，她也不认为这会导致进化。
That’s because Adamala’s team had to create genetic variation synthetically, instead of allowing for random mutations in DNA.
这是因为阿达马拉的团队必须合成地创造遗传变异，而不是允许 DNA 中的随机突变。
The enzyme that builds new DNA strands works too well, she said; it doesn’t introduce meaningful mutations into the sequence.
她说，构建新 DNA 链的酶效果太好了；它不会在序列中引入有意义的突变。
They will need to find an enzyme that is more error-prone — but not so error-prone that the genome’s integrity and the cell’s function is lost.
他们需要找到一种更容易出错的酶，但又不会太容易出错，以致基因组的完整性和细胞的功能丧失。
“Biology needs to change fast enough, but not too fast,” Adamala said.
“生物学需要足够快的变化，但不能太快，”阿达玛拉说。
She said that she needs to find the sweet spot between order and chaos, referencing the biochemist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman , a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, who argues that biology works best at the “edge of chaos.”
她说，她需要找到秩序和混乱之间的最佳平衡点，她引用了宾夕法尼亚大学名誉教授、生物化学家和复杂性理论家斯图尔特·考夫曼 (Stuart Kauffman) 的观点，他认为生物学在“混乱的边缘”表现得最好。
A clear demonstration of an evolutionary process is “clearly something that’s missing,” Boekhoven said.
博克霍文说，“显然缺少对进化过程的清晰展示”。
“I’m sure that that’s the next big step.” Other researchers have shown adaptive evolution in other types of synthetic cells .
“我确信这是下一个重大步骤。”其他研究人员已经展示了其他类型合成细胞的适应性进化。
But those cells were bacteria stripped of all but the bare minimum of genes — they weren’t built from the ground up.
但这些细胞是细菌，除了最少的基因外，几乎没有任何基因——它们并不是从头开始构建的。
The cells are also limited by the fact that they need to be fed many of their raw materials.
这些细胞还受到以下事实的限制：它们需要供给许多原材料。
That the cells can’t make their own ribosomes, the way natural cells do, “limits [their] potential for growth and sustained reproduction,” said Szostak, who was Adamala’s doctoral adviser.
阿达玛拉的博士生导师绍斯塔克说，细胞无法像自然细胞那样制造自己的核糖体，“限制了它们的生长和持续繁殖的潜力”。
“If their system was able to generate its own ribosomes and other proteins and RNAs, it would be much closer to existing biological cells such as bacteria.”
“如果他们的系统能够生成自己的核糖体以及其他蛋白质和 RNA，它将更接近现有的生物细胞，例如细菌。”
Adamala also thinks they will need to figure out a way to add a cytoskeleton to improve their replication system.
阿达玛拉还认为他们需要找到一种添加细胞骨架的方法来改善他们的复制系统。
Currently, the cells waste a lot of energy and time attracting molecules to crowd around and help them divide.
目前，细胞浪费了大量的能量和时间来吸引分子聚集并帮助它们分裂。
All told, scientists are far from building anything remotely close to a modern living cell — but this new one is still the most lifelike yet.
总而言之，科学家们还远远没有建造出任何与现代活细胞相近的东西——但这个新细胞仍然是迄今为止最逼真的。
“The modern cell is like a Dreamliner,” Adamala said, referring to the Boeing 787 airplane.
“现代电池就像一架梦想飞机，”阿达玛拉说，他指的是波音 787 飞机。
“We built a Wright flyer…
“我们建造了莱特飞行器......
the first bike frame with wings that flies 100 feet.”
第一个带翅膀的自行车车架可以飞 100 英尺。”
Alongside sharing the new results, Adamala and other synthetic biologists announced the formation of a nonprofit called Biotic, which they will use to make their synthetic biology tools available to researchers around the world.
除了分享新成果外，阿达马拉和其他合成生物学家还宣布成立一个名为 Biotic 的非营利组织，他们将利用该组织向世界各地的研究人员提供合成生物学工具。
The team is releasing their data and methods so that synthetic biologists can start building and improving on their cell.
该团队正在发布他们的数据和方法，以便合成生物学家可以开始构建和改进他们的细胞。
The hope is that the work can be used, decades from now, to create plastics without fossil fuels, for example, or fertilizers or drugs.
人们希望，这项工作可以在几十年后用于制造无需化石燃料、化肥或药物等的塑料。
These synthetic cells could also pave the way to the past, to the origins of biology itself.
这些合成细胞还可以为通向过去、通向生物学本身的起源铺平道路。
Life on Earth would have started from much simpler molecules than the ones that spudcells use.
地球上的生命可能是从比马铃薯细胞使用的分子简单得多的分子开始的。
Still, Adamala’s creation of a synthetic cell system from non-living materials brings researchers a step closer to exploring, in the lab, deeper questions about life’s origins and requirements, a dream she shares with others.
尽管如此，阿达玛拉用非生命材料创建的合成细胞系统使研究人员离在实验室探索有关生命起源和要求的更深层次问题又近了一步，这也是她与其他人分享的梦想。
“If you want to understand what life is,” Boekhoven said, “you need to first build life.”
“如果你想了解生命是什么，”博克霍文说，“你需要首先构建生命。”
Update: July 2, 2026 The paper link was updated after the preprint was accepted by and posted on biorxiv.org.
更新：2026 年 7 月 2 日 预印本被 biorxiv.org 接受并发布后，论文链接已更新。
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