Scientists unveil ten-year roadmap for building synthetic cells

Scientists from six Asian countries have launched an ambitious 10-year effort to build synthetic cells from non-living molecules, marking the region's first coordinated push to create an artificial single-celled biological system. The roadmap, published on May 26 in Nature Biotechnology and led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was developed through the SynCell Asia Initiative, which comprises more than 100 scientists from China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.