A living organism is made from components that aren’t themselves living. This simple statement has profound implications. For one, it means that there is no mystical force that animates us and other life forms. For another, it means that it should be possible to build a life form from scratch – and we are now a step closer to doing so.

Artificial life has been the guiding light of synthetic biology for some time. In 2010, biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California synthesised the stripped-down genome of a bacterium and inserted it into the chassis of another cell, emptied of its own DNA. The resulting organism, with a record-low number of genes (473) was able to grow and reproduce. But even then, scientists didn’t understand what a third of those genes were doing, or whether they were even needed. Instead of rebooting an existing cell with a synthetic genome, we need to build an organism from the ground up.

That is what scientists at the University of Missouri are now attempting. The SpudCell – named both to evoke Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, and for its resemblance to a potato – is an entity based on just 36 genes. It self-assembled when the genes were supplied with all the building blocks necessary for life, forming cell-like bubbles and making proteins.

SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life

But that’s it. The SpudCell can only make proteins because it is supplied with ribosomes, the crucial cell components that make proteins. It can’t metabolise food, supply itself with energy or reliably divide and reproduce. It isn’t alive, and it needs intensive care just to perform its basic functions. Nevertheless, the SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life. If a modern living cell is a jet airliner, the SpudCell is the rickety wooden-and-cotton proto-airplane made by the Wright brothers.

Better versions will soon follow, with potentially transformative applications. The hope is that synthetic cells will one day be able to supply materials that are currently derived from fossil fuels, such as plastics, fuels and fertiliser. That is keenly needed. But the work in understanding how a living entity operates will shed light on what life needs, and how it emerges from dead materials. If we crack this ultimate mystery, synthetic biology will have really delivered.

What is the SpudCell?

So, is it alive?

Can we really call it a synthetic cell, then?

How was it assembled?

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How do the cells divide?

Why not just put all the genes on one piece of DNA?

Why do the cells stop doing anything after about five rounds of division?

This is all very impressive, but why create SpudCell in the first place?

Could it ever be dangerous?

Human eggs seem to dispose of their waste more slowly than other cells do, which may help them avoid wear and tear – and explain why they live longer.

Every woman is born with a finite number of egg cells, or oocytes, which need to survive for about five decades. For cells, that’s an unusually long time. Although some human cells, like those in the brain and eyes, can live as long as you do, most have much shorter lifespans, in part because the natural processes that allow them to function also damage them over time.

Cells must recycle their proteins as a form of necessary housekeeping – but it comes at a cost. The energy consumed in this process can generate molecules called reactive oxygen species, or ROS, which cause random damage in the cell. “This is damage happening in the background all the time,” says at Center for Genomic Regulation in Spain.  “The more ROS there is, the more damage there’s going to be.”

But healthy eggs seem to avoid this issue. To find out why, Böke and her colleagues studied harvested human eggs under a microscope. The cells were placed in a liquid with fluorescent dyes, which bind to acidic cellular components, called lysosomes, that behave as “recycling plants”, says at the University of Cologne in Germany.

The bright dye revealed the waste-disposing lysosomes in human eggs were less active than the same components in other human cell types or those in the egg cells of smaller mammals, like mice. Zaffagnini and his colleagues say this may be a form of self preservation.

Slowing down their waste-disposal mechanism may be just one of many ways human egg cells achieve their relatively long lifespans, says Zaffagnini. Böke speculates to avoid damage, the human oocytes “put a brake on everything”. If all cell processes run slower in human egg cells, she says, this could result in lower levels of harmful ROS, and therefore less risk of damage.

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Since delaying the protein-recycling process seems to help egg cells maintain their health, failing to do so could explain what makes some oocytes unhealthy. “The way I see this is, it could be a clue into why human oocytes really become dysfunctional after a certain time,” says at Yale School of Medicine. “It could be a segue into advanced assessment of all the things that go wrong in human oocytes,” he says.

Assessing egg health in this way could eventually improve fertility treatments. “We do know that protein degradation is essential for cell survival, so it 100 per cent does affect fertility,” says Böke. She notes the study focused on healthy eggs; she says work to compare those cells with eggs from people affected by complications with fertility is ongoing. “If there’s high ROS in the cell, there are poor IVF outcomes,” she says.

Human egg cells are still not well understood, because they are difficult to study. “[They are] hard to work with, because the sample limitation is an issue,” says Böke. Seli says this obstacle is one of “multiple layers” to the problem, which also include regulations restricting the study of egg cells and a lack of funding.

If these hurdles can be surpassed, Zaffagnini says, there may be “really surprising” results. “It’s really worth it,” he says.