A lab-built cell that feeds, grows and divides, yet still isn't alive (quantamagazine.org)
The wall the field kept hitting was division. Adamala's fix was to ditch the cytoskeleton: protein tags on the membrane pull in crowding proteins that bend it until the sac splits. Everything else runs on borrowed parts, 36 off-the-shelf enzymes plus feeder bubbles of sugar and ribosomes.
The team is candid that it is "not alive by any definition" and can't make its own ribosomes. The same lab also drew grumbling: the manuscript was rejected by Cell, then mailed to reporters before a preprint went up for peers to check.
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