Briefing Chat: ‘Zombie cells’ resurrected with new genes
Nature Podcast
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4.5 • 893 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Nature staff discuss some of the week's top science news.
00:18 ‘Zombie cells’ revived with genome transplant
Nature: ‘Zombie cells’ return from the dead — after a genome transplant
05:27 A limit to cloning, in mice
Nature: Can a mouse be cloned indefinitely? Decades-long experiment has answers
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast. |
| 0:07.5 | This is the Friday show where we take you through a couple of stories that have been featured in the Nature briefing. |
| 0:12.1 | Nature's daily email roundup of the latest science news. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm Nick Pertruchel. |
| 0:16.4 | And I'm Charmody Bundell and I have a oddly Halloween themed story for you this week actually. It's all about zombie cells. |
| 0:23.9 | Yeah, it seems like an odd time of year to talk about it, considering it's nearly Easter, but take me away. What is a zombie cell? |
| 0:31.2 | Yeah, so this is a nature news article and it's based on a bioarchive paper. And yeah, a zombie cell is basically a cell that they've |
| 0:39.1 | killed, sort of killed, and then brought back to life. |
| 0:43.3 | Thus, the zombie. |
| 0:44.1 | Orrism from the dead. Maybe it is Easter-themed, after all. But these are bacteria of the genus |
| 0:49.2 | mycoplasma. So these bacteria, how does one bring them back to life? And why is that something that scientists would be interested in doing? |
| 0:56.6 | Yeah, it's the why that is key because they weren't really interested in bringing them back to life. That is not the point of this study at all. This is all about genetic engineering and transferring genomes from one species to another. So I'm going to give you a bit of background here. There's some old news that is still very interesting. |
| 1:13.0 | It was about 15 years ago. |
| 1:14.3 | There was a paper which has actually got some of the authors of this paper on as well. |
| 1:18.2 | And it was about creating what they called the first synthetic cell. |
| 1:24.3 | So what they did was they chemically synthesized the genome, so 1.1 million base pairs, like the full genome of this particular cell. So what they did was they chemically synthesized the genome, so 1.1 million base pairs, |
| 1:29.6 | like the full genome of this particular mycoplasma bacterium, so mycoplasma mycoides. |
| 1:35.4 | And then they transplanted it into a closely related species, mycoplasma capricolum. |
| 1:41.4 | So this is now a species with an entirely synthetic genome and they put a little |
| 1:45.9 | antibiotic resistance gene in there, which basically is the way that you tell whether it's worked |
| 1:50.8 | or not, because you can't really go in and look. But what you can do is you can grow your cells |
| 1:54.3 | in the antibiotics and the ones that are fine presumably have this gene in and therefore presumably |
... |
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