Put a banana in a blender, and you don’t expect to get it back. But blend up a bunch of living cells and new research suggests that you maybe should.

If simply left alone, the liquid innards of a cell — its cytoplasm — have a surprising capacity to reassemble, even without components that appeared essential to some scientists. Experiments recently described in Science revealed the unanticipated extent of this talent and delved into its mechanics. They vividly illustrated how well equipped cells are to restore themselves to order after chaos intrudes, and they might­­ brighten the prospects of scientists who hope someday to create completely artificial cells.

“It was really an accidental discovery, the sort of experiment you would conceive of an 8-year-old doing,” said James Ferrell, a chemical and systems biologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Just take a bunch of eggs and smoosh them up and see what happens.”

When Xianrui Cheng, a postdoctoral researcher in Ferrell’s lab, first witnessed the eggs unscrambling themselves, he was looking for something else: signals that tell cells to die. As a normal part of healthy growth and development, an organism sometimes needs for some of its cells to die on schedule. Cheng wanted to see how the signal responsible for this cellular suicide (apoptosis) spreads within a cell, and to do so, he needed cytoplasm.

He got it in a way an 8-year-old would approve of, by blending a mass of eggs from a common lab animal, the squat African frog Xenopus laevis, in a centrifuge. The sizable egg cells each measure more than 1 millimeter across, which makes them bountiful sources of cytoplasm.

Next, Cheng added frog sperm, although his intent wasn’t (and couldn’t be) to fertilize the mixture. Instead, from previous studies of apoptosis, he knew that as the death signal spread through the cytoplasm, the nuclei from the sperm would vanish. If he exposed one end of a tube of the cytoplasm to a trigger for apoptosis, then the disappearance of the nuclei would mark the signal’s spread.

But before death arrived for the nuclei, he noticed something odd about them. Rather than remaining at their initial random positions, the sperm nuclei appeared to be repositioning and organizing themselves. When Cheng looked at a drop of the cytoplasm more closely on a slide under the microscope, he watched the nuclei space themselves out in a lattice-like formation. Moreover, the cellular organs (organelles) and skeletal proteins arranged themselves around the nuclei, creating compartments that, to Cheng, resembled a sheet of skin cells.

Cheng tried again, this time without the sperm. But still, the cell-like compartments emerged. “I just thought, how could it be? We homogenized the living matter, the biological material. How could it return to some kind of structured organization?” Cheng said. “It’s like coming back to life.”

Striking as this activity was, it wasn’t without precedent. Self-organization occurs at many levels in living systems. String the right sequence of amino acids together and a long peptide chain will fold itself into a working protein. Cells within an early embryo arrange themselves to generate tissues to build a human.

Likewise, scientists have taken the molecular components of many cellular structures — including ribosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, the spindle that divides chromosomes during cell division, and the complexes that trigger a mother cell to split into daughters — and coaxed them into reassembling themselves outside living cells.

But notwithstanding scientists’ previous successes in getting various cellular structures to emerge outside the natural environment of the cell, Cheng and Ferrell are the first to get the entire cytoplasm to arrange itself as if inside a whole cell, said Rebecca Heald, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It’s an amazing demonstration of the properties of the cytoplasm and its ability to self-organize,” she said. “Visually, it’s incredibly striking that you can have this kind of organization happen spontaneously after homogenizing these eggs.”

Seeing the compartments emerge made Cheng and Ferrell want to know how it happened. They knew at the outset that the DNA contained in the sperm was not responsible, since self-organization wouldn’t require the expression of genes. However, they quickly zeroed in on another suspect: a star-shaped organelle called an aster derived from the sperm. “We thought, aha, the sperms are making asters form, and the asters are dividing up the cytoplasm,” Ferrell said.

These asters, constructed of hollow rods called microtubules, sprout from a structure known as the centrosome, which organizes the microtubules. When cells rest between divisions, microtubule asters organize the cell’s contents. Frog eggs lack usable centrosomes, so when Cheng added the sperm, he gave the cytoplasm a powerful organizational tool.

But not one that the cytoplasm couldn’t do without: In the absence of sperm, the process still happened, although it took nearly twice as long and proceeded differently. Small voids formed in the cytoplasm, then coalesced into empty border zones. Within these boundaries, the microtubules organized themselves, ultimately producing compartments that closely resembled those formed under the guidance of sperm centrosomes.