New Delhi, July 3 -- MINNEAPOLIS - In a Minneapolis laboratory, a synthetic cell assembled from nonliving chemical components divided, passed genetic information to its daughter cells, and showed evidence of natural selection, the condition that separates this work from every predecessor. The University of Minnesota team published their findings as a preprint on the bioRxiv repository on July 2, calling the system SpudCell. It has not been peer reviewed.

What peer review will assess, and what the preprint does not resolve, is whether what SpudCell demonstrates constitutes life. The system carries a 90,000-base-pair synthetic genome, smaller by orders of magnitude than most bacterial genomes, and depends on ribosomes borrowed from Escheri...