lastcel

Lastcel is a term used primarily in speculative fiction and hobbyist discussion to denote either the last surviving functional cell in a multicellular organism or a theoretical minimal self-sustaining unit that could, in principle, give rise to life. It is not an established scientific concept and has no formal definition in biology.

The coinage combines "last" and "cell" and has appeared in online forums, role-playing games, and some science-fiction narratives since the early 2000s. In those contexts, a lastcel often serves as a plot device to explore persistence, reproduction from minimal information, and the ethics of creating or preserving life.

In fictional portrayals, a lastcel is typically described as highly robust, capable of limited self-repair, and able to propagate into a population under extreme conditions. Some variants attribute to the lastcel features such as autonomous energy harvesting, simplified genome, or connections to digital memory or environmental sensing.

Scholarly discussion generally treats lastcel as a metaphorical construct rather than a biological reality. Critics note that real-life minimal life stages, such as spores or extremophiles, do not correspond to a single "last cell" and that the concept conflates information processing with cellular viability.

Related topics include minimal cell theory, synthetic biology, origin of life research, and cellular automata as models for life-like systems.