I thought this was quite dramatic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/01/synthetic-life-lab-made-dna-spudcells-scientists

It seems these artificial liposomes carry DNA that can make protein (not sure if RNA is involved, having not read the paper), being fed with ATP and nutrients from the growth medium and can actually make (unreliable) copies and cause the cells to divide. That seems fairly extraordinary, if I've understood it correctly.

The research paper, which is still a preprint, is here: https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/

It seems to trigger cell division via a buildup of protein on the cell wall that eventually makes it split open, so not like the mechanism in living cells.

But very intriguing as an exploration of some of the steps by which a version of life could possibly have started.

Protein biosynthesis is facilitated by putting in E. coli proteins (i.e. the whole machinery) into it. It is an extension of pure in vitro models (where the same reaction essentially happens in a vial), with some interesting elements of encapsulation. It is still not tackling the tricky bits, but it is more systematic as other approaches.

45 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Protein biosynthesis is facilitated by putting in E. coli proteins (i.e. the whole machinery) into it. It is an extension of pure in vitro models (where the same reaction essentially happens in a vial), with some interesting elements of encapsulation. It is still not tackling the tricky bits, but it is more systematic as other approaches.

Can you expand that a bit? My understanding was that living organisms make protein from RNA, which is made from a DNA template. Can protein be made direct from DNA as well?

DNA and RNA both just encode the sequence of amino acids in a protein. During protein biosynthesis, the mRNA is introduced to the ribosome, where the assembly of the proteins happen (and includes also tRNA as the carriers of the amino acids, as well as a few other element).

This whole process can nowadays be done cell-free using a mix that basically are lysates of bacterial or eukaryotic cells containing ribosomes, as well as polymerases (to transcribe RNA from DNA) and so on. So in essence, by adding the right vector (basically DNA) you can produce proteins in a vial. You can easily buy those as ready-to-use kits.

The main difference here is that they are using a defined set of purified 30-something proteins rather than lysates, making it costlier, but also better defined.

Edit: because of that limitations I think we can infer very little mechanistically about early life. However, it could be a way to explore certain aspects of it.