Help Build the Future of Nucleus
The Conscience Report
In 2025, we partnered with Conscience to independently survey the synthetic cell community. Their report assesses the needs and challenges of collaboration and serves as a foundation for the next phase of Nucleus. We’re now using the report as a launching point to chart the next steps forward for Nucleus.
Conscience has summarized key takeaways in a series of blog posts below; we recommend exploring these before diving into the full report.
Your Input Needed
While individual labs are making fast progress, a lack of interoperable technology and easy collaboration is limiting progress for the synthetic cell field as a whole. Nucleus exists to provide a shared platform for integration and collaboration, and must reflect the values, incentives, and needs of the community.
The Conscience Report confirmed much of what motivated us to launch Nucleus, but has also surfaced important questions about governance, recognition, and b.next’s role. We need input from the community to ensure these are the right questions, and to shape a response and where Nucleus goes from here.
Key Themes
The report describes several themes that emerged from interviews with researchers and tech-transfer professionals within the synthetic cell community:
From One Lab to Many Labs
Theme 1:
The importance of collaboration in synthetic cell research
“If everybody thinks that they're going to build a synthetic cell on their own, they're going to waste a lot of time and they're not going to manage it. So we do need everybody involved.”
Theme 2:
An integration and reproducibility problem: Nucleus filling a critical need
“Biology is really complicated and even if the thing works in this particular context and it works great and I’ve validated it and I’ve got a data sheet that says it and everything, does not mean you can grab it and pop it in your thing. We are lacking a deep intellectual framework of context - what context means in biology. And until we have that, large-scale efforts to modularize everything, I think they’re fine to play around with. I’m not sure how successful they’ll be”
Theme 3:
Collaboration and collaboration sharing practice
The general consensus is that collaboration still primarily occurs among small, trusted lab-to-lab groups, often just two labs sharing with one another. Even larger consortia, like Build-a-Cell, are best described as a semi-open middle ground where only members of the consortium (as opposed to everyone) have access to shared resources and where active collaboration tends to cluster in groups of 3 to 5 labs.
Building For Reuse and Interoperability
Theme 4:
Awareness, understanding and definition of open science and open source
Awareness and understanding of open science and the practices it entails varied widely among respondents. Some researchers requested a definition to start the interview while others demonstrated a detailed understanding. A common note from respondents is that community leaders—particularly those behind Build-a-Cell—have played an outsized role in defining and normalizing openness.
Theme 5:
Motivations for Participation in Open Science and Open Source
“It’s important to me that we’re all building the future together that we want to live in… we would love nothing more than our stuff to go out there and change the world. Get it in somebody’s hands, get it changing the world.”
Theme 6:
Barriers, caveats and qualifiers for sharing
A major concern was that researchers want to make sure that what they share is meaningful and useful. Researchers won’t share, and others won’t use, resources unless they are validated and properly annotated. They don’t want to create “too much data that you can’t trust.”
Engagement Timeline
We hope Nucleus will be useful to the community for decades to come. As a first step towards expanding dialogue, we will be engaging the community in three stages over the next 6 months to guide the future direction of Nucleus:
Phase 1 (April 22 – May 22)
Conscience will share a series of blog posts highlighting key findings from the Report and gather opinions, questions, and responses to the Report, and add nuance to its findings.
Phase 2 (June – August)
b.next will share a series of blog posts to discuss critical topics identified by the community and invite community discussion.
Phase 3 (Early Fall)
b.next will work with members of the community to integrate feedback and share next steps for Nucleus, governance, and community engagement.
How to participate
Please read the summary posts authored by Dylan Roskams-Edris from Conscience and take the survey:
Take the Stage 1 Survey
Contact Dylan Roskams-Edris from Conscience or Anton Molina from b.next with any questions.