Scientists are captivated by the prospect of creating a fully synthetic cell, offering the potential to revolutionize biology, medicine and biotechnology. In this Viewpoint, a panel of experts discusses the definitions of a synthetic cell and highlights current achievements, challenges and future opportunities of building such systems.
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The contributors
Kate Adamala: is a biochemist engineering synthetic cells. Her research aims to understand the chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development and basic research. Kate is a co-founder of the synthetic cell therapeutics startup Synlife, and coordinator of the international Build-a-Cell synthetic cell community.
Marileen Dogterom: is a biophysicist and professor of bionanoscience at Delft University of Technology. Her interests include biophysics of the cytoskeleton and building minimal cytoskeletal systems for synthetic cells. She leads the Dutch consortium on Building Synthetic Cells and is one of the founding members of the European Synthetic Cell Initiative.
Yuval Elani: is co-director of the fabriCELL Centre at Imperial College London. He is a biotechnologist who leads a group working on bioinspired engineering approaches for new synthetic cell therapies, delivery vehicles, vaccines, AgriTech tools and cellular models. His research spans synthetic biology, biohybrid engineering, microfluidics and chemical biology.
Petra Schwille: is biophysicist and director of the Cellular and Molecular Biophysics Department at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. Her research is concerned with the question what the smallest living system could look like, and how to construct it from the bottom-up.
Masahiro Takinoue: is a biophysicist and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology, focusing on soft matter physics, molecular computing and DNA nanotechnology for artificial cell construction. Recent interest in his laboratory involves the design of DNA-based and RNA-based phase separation droplets for artificial cells and organelles.
T-Y Dora Tang: is a professor of synthetic biology at the University of Saarland (and partner group at the MPI-CBG). Her interdisciplinary research contributes to artificial cell synthesis, unravelling the origin of cellular life and using synthetic cells as models for modern biological systems.
Related links
Adamala lab: http://www.protobiology.org/indexd.php
Dogterom lab: https://www.tudelft.nl/tnw/over-faculteit/afdelingen/bionanoscience/research/research-labs/marileen-dogterom-lab
Elani lab: https://www.elanigroup.org/
Schwille lab: https://www.biochem.mpg.de/schwille
Takinoue lab: https://takinoue-lab.jp/
Tang lab: https://www.mpi-cbg.de/research/researchgroups/currentgroups/dora-tang/research-focus
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Adamala, K.P., Dogterom, M., Elani, Y. et al. Present and future of synthetic cell development. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 25, 162–167 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-023-00686-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-023-00686-9
