Nature is beautiful, powerful and essential. But nature is not always gentle. The same biological world that gives rise to forests, coral reefs and human life also produces infections, cancer, genetic ...

In leukemia's most aggressive forms, the blood cell factories in our bone marrow falter. Instead of dividing and multiplying ...

A tiny bubble of lipids, enzymes and DNA has done something biologists have chased for years: it carried out a full cycle of life-like behavior without starting from a living cell. The system, called ...

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge in collaboration with colleagues at HHMI Janelia and NIH, have created some of the most detailed three-dimensional maps ever ...

Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time that feeds, grows and replicates like a natural cell, a breakthrough in synthetic biology.

As 2025 comes to a close, the editors at The Scientist asked researchers to reflect on the biggest breakthroughs in cell biology this year. They named advances in everything from embryo models for ...

What makes something alive? We simply don't know, but synthetic biologists are a step closer to providing an answer thanks to SpudCell, the most sophisticated attempt at creating an artificial life fo ...

For over a decade, scientists have made extraordinary progress on the long-held dream of fabricating an entire cell from nonliving molecules and materials. Such synthetic (or "engineered") cells would ...

Recycling takes place in our cells at all times: in a process called autophagy, cell components that are no longer needed are enclosed by membranes and broken down into their basic building blocks.