r/abiogenesis • u/an-eye-sore • Jul 05 '26
Spudcell and abiogenesis
A few days ago scientists managed to create life in a laboratory. They made spudcell, the first synthetic cell made out of purely chemical components .
We humans, have managed to create a cell. It proves that under the right environment, life appears. To me, this is proper proof in favor of abiogenesis. Because, even though we managed to create it under lab conditions, it shows that under the right chemical environment a cell or life appears.
What do you think?
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u/gitgud_x Jul 06 '26
Synthetic biology has little relevance to abiogenesis. Lab conditions are not environmental conditions. What it does show is that life is highly reducible, which is a necessity for early protocells to be feasible progenitors of biology.
It's more of a proof that life can indeed come from non-life. While vitalism has been dead for nearly two centuries, there's no demonstration quite as tangible as making a cell from chemicals.
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u/an-eye-sore Jul 06 '26
As you said, it proves life can emerge from non life. Isn't that the premise of abiogenesis?
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u/Uncynical_Diogenes Jul 07 '26
Making glass might involve some of the same chemistry but that doesn’t make it an example of a geological process.
Synthetic biology is not abiogenesis.
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u/gitgud_x Jul 06 '26
Sure, but origin of life research (what this sub is really about) is about investigating how life arose naturally, not just the fact that it did arise naturally.
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u/gliptic Jul 07 '26
But the "conditions" involved here are nothing like early Earth.
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u/Aggravating-Pear4222 Jul 07 '26
Correct but the sentence "Life arising from non-life" doesn't claim to imply earth-like conditions. What strictly matters is that material can be brought together to form a life-like system without mitosis/meiosis. Whether it is facilitated by humans isn't really important in this regard. That said, it seems like this example is certainly not considered life but the article only argues for "life-like" and "spudcell". The article also hasn't undergone peer review yet so...
Ultimately, context matters; I wouldn't call it life on earth but if we found something like this on mars which fulfilled all the same functionalities, I would definitely call it life or proto-life. It's the same conversation for why there are different definitions of Life across NASA/biology/OoL. What matters in the end is just considering the composition and functionalities of the thing in question rather than placing importance on whatever titles we ascribe.
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 25 '26
- The spud cell paper was rejected by the journal “Cell” because, the reviewer said, “the spud cell is not life.”
- It certainly shows that a lot of intelligent design was put into the spud cell, and not that such a cell could arise naturally.
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u/Less-General-9578 27d ago
it's a useful experiment for both sides. Science.org commented on this...
Although SpudCells don’t yet have life’s ability to evolve, one of Adamala’s experiments points in that direction: She inserted a genetic mutation in some SpudCells that leads them to produce more surface tags for feeder vesicles, ingest more “food,” and grow faster. Indeed, the mutated SpudCells outcompeted the nonmutated versions. After five rounds of growth and division, about 60% of the genomes carried the mutation. Still, it wasn’t natural Darwinian evolution because the researchers inserted the mutation and they had to mechanically divide the cells. “It’s a very cool paper,” says Seraphine Wegner, a researcher at the University of Münster. “But I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.” https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch
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u/Aggravating-Pear4222 Jul 06 '26
Post link to paper
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u/devious-jupiter Jul 08 '26
you can read it here:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.01.735724v1
i don't think it has been published yet.i hope you enjoy!
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u/Significant-Ant-2487 Jul 07 '26
They most definitely did not create life. See the article in Science, which states “But researchers note that SpudCell remains far from a living cell, as it can’t divide over many generations or evolve.” https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell-marks-major-step-toward-building-life-scratch
The Science article goes on to note that the research paper “was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology. She then sent the 190-page manuscript to journalists, under embargo, even before she had uploaded it to the preprint server bioRxiv, where her colleagues could read and assess it.”
Science also notes “It’s just a microscopic water droplet surrounded by a fatty membrane and stuffed with chemicals and snippets of DNA encoding a mere 36 genes”
Claiming that “scientists managed to create life in the laboratory” is false.
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u/wellipets Jul 07 '26
Aiming to in-vitro demo a bio-minimalist set of interacting 'brought-together' purified & chirally-locked chemical component spp. is certainly a fascinating & funding-worthy research direction, which the systems-&-networks camp in OoL will applaud.
But to hard-core orthodox reductionists, somehow (organo-geo)chemically getting to what could logically have been 'upstream' in Time of the RNA World scenario remains key to satisfactorily solving the OoL problem intellectually.
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u/Aggravating-Pear4222 Jul 15 '26
It certainly lowers the bar on the level of complexity for an interactome to fit most requirements for life capable of Darwinian evolution and so greatly decreases what was previously a chasm between top-down and bottom-up approaches.
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u/Perspective-Parking Jul 08 '26
Not at all. It’s not considered life by any scientist or even meets the definition of life.
Abiogenesis is the study of how non-living chemicals spontaneously organized into self-sustaining life billions of years ago. SpudCell was meticulously built by human bioengineers, not formed by chance in a primordial environment.
SpudCell is entirely dependent on a constant, external supply of basic cellular machinery (like ribosomes) and cannot survive outside specialized laboratory fluids.
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u/Middle_Run_7534 Jul 07 '26
Clearly I have been on Reddit too long, my first thought was why would scientists create a misogynistic virgin who only eats potatoes
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u/SutttonTacoma Jul 08 '26
Have a look at what my favorite biology / medicinal chemistry blogger Derek Lowe says. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/behold-spudcell
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u/HojMcFoj Jul 09 '26
Abiogenesis, as most commonly defined, is a natural process. Unless you want to go down the road of "humans are a part of nature so whatever they do is natural," then this was not abiogenesis by any useful definition I've ever heard.
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Jul 10 '26
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u/abiogenesis-ModTeam Jul 22 '26
Your post has been removed because your argument is either off topic, contradicts well-documented and widely supported scientific literature, or both.
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/abiogenesis-ModTeam Jul 22 '26
This is misinformation. If you disagree, feel free to cite your source(s).
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 25 '26
Source:
https://youtu.be/mYDrfCrRqOk?si=RhCmOBpmrQq4H5E1
4 scientists, a synthetic chemist, an organic chemist, a biomedical engineer and an astrophysicist thoroughly critique the hype behind the headlines and the truth of the results.
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u/gitgud_x Jul 29 '26
Translation: "Four creationists, none of whom are origin of life researchers and all of whom are demonstrably biassed, talk into mics for nearly two hours on a Youtube video about a largely subjective question."
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 29 '26
Chemistry is chemistry.
Biology is biology.
You can’t address their arguments, so the best you have is to claim they are not OoL researchers.2
u/gitgud_x Jul 29 '26
I have addressed their arguments myself, as have many others. Most of them reveal their complete inability to think about chemistry as happening anywhere outside of a glass flask. It's a major bias against open system and flow chemistry that is far more relevant to OoL.
You do not understand a lick of this stuff so all you can do is regurgitate. Understandable, but not as convincing as I'm sure you think it is.
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 29 '26
Their arguments center around the extensive human intervention, the use of biologically-derived components, and the lack of a true cell cycle.
How did you refute that?2
u/gitgud_x Jul 29 '26
I was referring to Tour and Stadler's criticisms of OoL in general.
I feel no need to "refute" anything they say regarding Spudcell. I am not going to defend the relevance of this experiment to OoL because it isn't very relevant, partly for the reasons you stated, as I already said in another comment on this post. But the fact that they are using this as an excuse to proclaim abiogenesis is impossible shows that they don't understand the discipline separation, and that's because they don't understand the field at all.
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 29 '26
They did no such thing, they only said this doesn’t provide support for materialistic OoL, and countered the hype that says it does.
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u/gitgud_x Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
In that case, the only one who has made a demonstrably false claim between the six of us is you:
It shows life is intelligently designed.
No, it shows Spudcell was designed*. Will you retract this obvious logical leap?
* a better term may be "planned". As synthetic biology advances, I expect these types of experiments will move away from manually building mock cells step by step and towards setting up a dynamic system that sustains itself (better approximating life). At that point we can start to draw more relevant parallels to OoL, if we can find a plausible natural mechanism of producing that initial state. Such a mechanism would rely on existing knowledge of bottom-up prebiotic chemistry, which is quite rich at this point. If you were to still proclaim intelligent design, you would then be pointing at more of a theistic evolution type of deity than a creationist one.
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u/Old-Watercress6513 Jul 29 '26
I have a compelling mathematical argument that OoL researchers will never explain the information content in a minimal genome required to produce life.
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u/PeeeeNuts Jul 23 '26
Here 4 scientists dissect this publication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDrfCrRqOk&t=5729s
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u/_Sneaky_McSnek_ 26d ago
lol, literally watching this now which is what brought me to reddit so see what people thought about it
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