Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 2, 2026

Can scientists build a living cell from scratch?

Building a living cell from parts

Where it stands as of Sep 4, 2026

The minimal genome work has held up: JCVI-syn3.0 runs on just 473 genes, and a synthetic cell nicknamed SpudCell was reported growing, copying its DNA and dividing, though only about 30 percent still carried DNA after five generations. The synthetic yeast consortium finished all 16 chromosomes about five years past the 2018 target it set itself. Combining them into a single fully synthetic yeast cell is still unfinished.

0 of 1 promise kept, 1 slipped

Scientists are assembling the minimum machinery of life from scratch, testing whether the core functions of a living cell need anything mysterious at all.

The story so far

Jul 2, 2026 Latest

A synthetic cell nicknamed SpudCell was reported growing, copying its DNA and dividing, with about 30 percent still carrying DNA after five generations.

Today Got Better
Jul 1, 2026

Doctors reported the first life saved by CRISPR base editing, a precise gene-editing method, in a patient.

Today Got Better
Nov 8, 2023

An international consortium reported synthetic versions of all 16 yeast chromosomes plus a 17th of their own design, the first time a complex cell's genome has been largely rebuilt from scratch. The pieces still live in separate strains, waiting to be combined into one synthetic cell.

NYU Langone Health
Jul 5, 2023

Stripping a genome to its minimum left the cell frail, with less than half the fitness of its ancestor. Left to evolve for 2,000 generations, about 300 days, it clawed almost all of that back, showing that even a bare-bones cell can adapt.

Nature
Mar 29, 2021

The minimal cell had a problem: it divided into lumpy, uneven shapes. A JCVI and NIST team added back 19 genes to make JCVI-syn3A, which splits cleanly into matched daughters again. Five of the genes needed for tidy division still have no known job.

NIST
May 15, 2019

Jason Chin's team at Cambridge rebuilt the entire four-million-letter genome of E. coli from scratch, rewriting it to run on 61 genetic code words instead of the usual 64. The recoded bacterium, Syn61, lived and divided, the largest synthetic genome made at the time.

Nature
Mar 25, 2016

Six years later the same group stripped that genome down to the bone. JCVI-syn3.0 runs on just 473 genes, the smallest set of any organism that can grow on its own, and even so, 149 of those genes did jobs nobody could explain.

J. Craig Venter Institute
May 20, 2010

The J. Craig Venter Institute booted up the first cell run entirely by a human-made genome. Researchers synthesized the full DNA of a Mycoplasma bacterium from chemicals, dropped it into an emptied cell, and watched it come to life and copy itself. The press nicknamed it Synthia.

J. Craig Venter Institute

On the record

The checkable promises in this story, dated the day they were made. A promise is marked kept, slipped or partly met only when a later report says so; past its own date with no report, it reads "no word", which is what silence honestly is.

Slipped Mar 9, 2017 · due Dec 31, 2018 · resolved Nov 8, 2023

The international Synthetic Yeast Genome (Sc2.0) consortium set itself a public target of finishing the first synthetic yeast genome, all 16 chromosomes, by 2018.

The Sc2.0 synthetic yeast consortium, with BGI and partners

has set itself the ambitious task of producing the first synthetic yeast genome (16 chromosomes ~14 Mbp) by 2018

The consortium held roughly 6 of the 16 chromosomes when it set the 2018 target. All 16 synthetic chromosomes were finished and reported in November 2023, about five years late, and combining them into a single fully synthetic yeast cell is still unfinished.

PR Newswire NYU Langone Health

The story so far

On the record

This story moves with the morning letter.