Biologists Create the Most Lifelike Artificial Cells Yet

November 21, 2018

(Science) – Yet these mock cells are cutting-edge, “the closest anyone has come to building an actual functioning synthetic eukaryotic cell,” says synthetic biologist Kate Adamala of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not part of the work. Like real cells, the spheres can send protein signals to their neighbors, triggering communal behavior. And as Devaraj and his team revealed in a preprint recently posted on the bioRxiv site, the “nucleus” talks to the rest of the cell, releasing RNA that sparks the synthesis of proteins. The artificial nuclei can even respond to signals from other cell mimics. “This may be the most important paper in synthetic biology this year,” Adamala says.