[Physicist]

The hardest part of cell division is duplicating and separating the DNA. It's probably pretty easy to come up with a cell division mechanism for a DNA-free cell. If the cell simply kept growing, it would eventually break up automatically.

[general_re]

It's probably pretty easy to come up with a cell division mechanism for a DNA-free cell.

Hmmm. It's been a while since I thought about lipid chemistry, but I think we could imagine such a thing. It would need a method of automatically partitioning itself without spilling its guts everywhere. I bet we could dream one up where some environmental change triggers such a partitioning. However...

If the cell simply kept growing, it would eventually break up automatically.

...do you mean our hypothetical cell, or do you mean that extant cells will behave this way?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Of course, I assumed the 46 characters were chosen with probability 1/46. Things change if actual character probabilities are assigned.