SpudCell and Synthetic Minimal Cells: Towards Chemically Assembled Life
SpudCell and Synthetic Minimal Cells: Chemically Assembled Life Attribution: 1. Figure 1: Synthetic cells are artificial constructs designed to mimic core cellular functions such as compartmentalization, information processing, metabolism, and reproduction (Boersma et al., 2025). In recent work, these systems have been presented as modular assemblies of defined biochemical parts that can be tuned to perform selected cellular tasks while remaining fully engineered (Boersma et al., 2025). SpudCell can be placed within this broader trajectory as a synthetic minimal cell, assembled from nonliving molecular components and designed to carry out a life-like cycle that includes feeding, growth, genome replication, division, and selection. Its reported behavior aligns with current synthetic minimal cell frameworks that aim to reduce cellular complexity to a minimal but functional set of modules, rather than reproducing the full architecture of nat...