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Life brought to artificial cells

Can artificial cells be built from basic components? Systems that have complex architectures and functions evocative of natural cells have been prepared by recycling the contents of bacterial cells in synthetic droplets.
  1. N. Amy Yewdall

    1. N. Amy Yewdall is at the Institute for Molecules and Materials, Radboud University, Nijmegen 6500 GL, the Netherlands.

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Global collaborations have made promising strides towards building artificial cells ‘bottom up’ from constituent parts1, but the current state-of-the art results are still far from resembling anything alive. The difficulty lies in organizing functional features, such as enzymes, at the nanoscale and ensuring network connectivity between all the components. Writing in Nature, Xu et al.2 report that they have tackled this challenge by organizing pieces of broken-down cells on a synthetic scaffold, thereby producing artificial cells with functional and compositional complexity reminiscent of living ones. The findings take us a step closer to life-like systems that could be used for industrial applications — and towards a better understanding of life itself.

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Nature 609, 900-901 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02231-8

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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