Researchers have long dreamed of creating cells in the lab, to both understand life’s fundamentals and produce cells that can be better engineered to make certain compounds. But most have set their sights lower and tried to replicate individual cell functions, such as feeding or growth. Putting multiple functions together has been extremely challenging, because each tends to work best under a different set of conditions, for instance a certain amount of magnesium or a specific level of acidity. “Being able to incorporate all of these modules together in a synthetic cell is the feat that the field has been waiting for,” says Job Boekhoven, a systems chemist at the Technical University of Munich, although he stresses that the new paper’s claims need to be peer reviewed.