This is where the field got stuck for a while. Researchers before Adamala had come up with various ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and replicate their DNA. But cell division is a completely different matter. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton—a network of protein fibers that provide structural support—to split its DNA in half. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to make cells go through this complex process.
Therefore, Adamala decided to abandon the cytoskeleton. One day, while looking through the literature, she came across an interesting mechanism in an article. By attaching protein tags to the cell membrane, synthetic biologist Reinhard Lipowski of the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces attracted other proteins to cluster around and physically bend the membrane, causing the cell to divide. Following this approach, Adamala modified a cell membrane protein and tested it in her protocells. After several tries it worked.
“I didn’t let myself believe it for a while,” she said. “It was like, ‘Holy crap, did I actually create a dividing cell?’ … At some point, you’ve tested enough that (you think), “OK, now this is real.”
This paper “excellently demonstrates this separation mechanism,” said Job Behoven, a systems chemist at the Technical University of Munich who was not involved in the study. “It was a huge achievement.”
By combining systems created based on the experience of different laboratories: DNA replication; feeder liposomes; and the accumulation of proteins that cause division, and then by optimizing them to work together, Adamala’s team showed that in the laboratory it is possible to force the chemical world to shape the biological one.
“Combining all of these things is a stunning technical achievement,” Glass said. “I think this will be a watershed moment for the field of synthetic cells and biology in general.”
Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University who also was not involved in the study, agreed. This is “a remarkable achievement in synthetic biology,” he said. However, he also cautioned against making too much noise about the cell as it is not yet self-sufficient.
I think this will be a watershed moment for the field of synthetic cells and biology in general.
John Glass, J. Craig Venter Institute
Once the synthetic cells were created, her students and others began calling them Adamala cells, a nickname she hated. She insisted that the cells be named after something else, jokingly suggesting the name potato. So her students started calling them spadsells. “I’m Polish, I’m basically made of potatoes, so that’s fine with me,” Adamala said.
Each cell is tiny. Its genome is much smaller than that of bacteria and does not look like anything special. “It’s great for me because I’m really excited about it,” Adamala said. “But if you look at it under a microscope, you realize, ‘OK, it’s a blob.'”
Evolution and more
The cell could grow and divide. But can it take the next step towards life by evolving?
Researchers began tinkering with the DNA of a synthetic cell to see if they could make some cells grow larger or divide faster—essentially creating genetic variations within the cell population. They found that cells that became larger also had more daughter cells and began to become more numerous. In other words, these traits began to be selected within the population, the first step towards evolution.
What Adamala’s team demonstrated was not exactly natural selection, the underlying mechanism that drives evolutionary changes in which organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive. Even if she forced their cell to produce more daughter cells, she doesn’t think it would lead to evolution. That’s because Adamala’s team had to create genetic variations synthetically, rather than allowing random mutations in the DNA. The enzyme that creates new DNA strands works too well, she says; it does not introduce significant mutations into the sequence. They will need to find an enzyme that is more error-prone, but not so error-prone that genome integrity and cell function are lost.
“Biology has to change fast enough, but not too fast,” Adamala said. She said she needed to find a middle ground between order and chaos, citing biochemist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, who argues that biology works best at the “edge of chaos.”
A clear demonstration of the evolutionary process is “clearly what’s missing,” Boekhoven said. “I’m confident this is the next big step.” Other researchers have demonstrated adaptive evolution in other types of synthetic cells. But these cells were bacteria, lacking all but a minimum of genes—they were not built from scratch.
Cells are also limited by the fact that they need to be fed a lot of raw materials. That 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 supervisor. “If their system were able to generate its own ribosomes and other proteins and RNA, it would be much closer to existing biological cells such as bacteria.”
Adamala also thinks they will need to find a way to add a cytoskeleton to improve their replication system. Currently, cells spend a lot of energy and time attracting molecules that cluster around and help them divide.
Overall, scientists are a long way from creating anything remotely similar to a modern living cell, but this new cell is still the most realistic yet. “The modern cage is like the Dreamliner,” Adamala said, referring to the Boeing 787. “We built the Wright Flyer…the first bicycle with a frame and wings that could fly 100 feet.”
In addition to sharing new results, Adamala and other synthetic biologists announced the creation of a non-profit organization called Biotic, which they will use to make their synthetic biology tools available to researchers around the world. The team is publishing their data and methods so synthetic biologists can start building and improving their cells. It is hoped that decades from now this work can be used to create plastics without the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers or drugs.
These synthetic cells may also lead the way back in time to the origins of biology itself. Life on Earth would have arisen from much simpler molecules than those used by spud cells. However, Adamala’s creation of a system of synthetic cells from non-living materials brings researchers closer to exploring deeper questions in the laboratory about the origins and requirements of life, a dream she shares with others.
“If you want to understand what life is,” Boekhoven said, “you must first build life.”
Update: July 2, 2026
The link to the article was updated after the preprint was accepted and posted on biorxiv.org.