RCN Build-a-Cell: An Open Community Considering & Advancing the Construction of Synthetic Cells

Cells are the fundamental 'building blocks' that make up living organisms. However, we don't know exactly how cells were formed in the first place. We also don't know what all the molecules that make up any natural cell do. Finally, we still can't put molecules together ourselves to make a new, synthetic, cell. Addressing the questions and challenges posed above requires significant collaboration and cooperation. The Build-a-Cell Research Collaboration Network will facilitate studies on understanding and engineering a diverse range of synthetic cells. The future of biotechnology is in realizing fully-understood, lineage-agnostic organisms, beginning with a single cell. The Build-a-Cell network will integrate existing knowledge about engineering various aspects of biological systems, with the ultimate goal of facilitating construction of living cell from non-living components. Learning how to engineer a living cell from a set of well-understood parts will provide a leap in our understanding of life, and it will result in novel technologies beneficial for the scientific community and society. The skills and tools necessary to build a living cell from scratch will be useful in studying existing biology, while our understanding of life will be significantly improved by the ability to engineer living systems from known, defined parts.

Engineering a live cell will require close collaboration between teams with a wide array of different skill sets and capabilities. This network provides a formalized structure for collaboration between individual labs, bridging geographical and disciplinary divides. The network will host two workshops a year, to allow for intensive interactions between members, creation of new research collaborations, and exchange of ideas and unpublished results. We will facilitate meetings with researchers from other fields, who could either use technologies developed by the synthetic cell community, or provide us with tools from their own fields. This will be done by organizing tutorials and workshops during biology, biochemistry and bioengineering meetings. Other activities of the network will include outreach to the general public via popular science articles, social media presence, and outreach to meetings organized for and attended by minority students. Working groups of network members will create open access tutorials, including crowd-tested protocols for use of various synthetic cell-related technologies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.