This post is the first in a series explaining the key findings in Conscience’s 2025-26 study of the synthetic cell research community concerning field-level coordination, open science, and the future of Nucleus. The series is part of a follow-on community engagement process b.next has engaged Conscience to conduct.
To learn more about Conscience, details of the initial study, the new engagement process, and why your participation is important, please see this short introductory post. You can find a link to part two of the series at the end of this post.
Coordination, Fragmentation, and Collaboration in Synthetic Cell Research
This post summarizes themes 1-3 found in Part 1 of our study. For a more in-depth understanding of any of these topics, please read the relevant section of the report. Themes 1-3 concentrated on the importance of coordination across the synthetic cell field, fragmentation within the field, current collaboration practices, and the role of Nucleus.
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.”
- Researcher 1030
There was near universal agreement from respondents that synthetic cell science is too complex for any single lab to solve. In order for the field to advance effectively, field-level collaboration and coordination isn't just desirable but necessary. The current norm is, however, for labs to work in silos or in small groups (i.e., ~3 collaborating labs). The lack of large-scale coordination has meant that progress in the field is slower than expected.
The lack of field-level coordination is due to several important elements. A driving factor is that there is significant geographical and institutional isolation between labs. In many places, there is only one synthetic cell researcher per institution. Another factor is that there exist relatively few organizations like Nucleus and Build-a-Cell concentrating on field-level coordination.
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”
- Researcher 0819
Continuing a finding in theme 1, respondents said that one of the elements slowing down the field is a significant fragmentation problem. Due to a lack of standards across the field, reagents and protocols often behave differently across labs and lessons learned in one system often do not transfer.
Beyond the lack of accepted standards, a major driver of fragmentation is the mismatch between individual-level incentives within academic research environments (i.e., novelty, publication, high-impact to differentiate from other groups) and the building of shared tools and infrastructure. To this latter point, a respondent said “I think there's a general problem in that people prioritize getting things working for them over getting things working that others can use.”
Nucleus was widely seen as one of the primary entities currently filling this coordination-gap and attempting to align incentives. Additionally, respondents expressed a worry that without something like Nucleus the field will fail to advance rapidly. This position is best expressed by one researcher stating “I think it is fixing what's wrong. I think it's a big piece and I really hope this experiment of Nucleus can work. I don't know what Plan B would be for the field”
Theme 3 - Collaboration and collaboration sharing practice
Nucleus represents a particular model of collaboration built around broad open sharing of research resources. Theme 3 looked into how that model differs from standard collaboration models.
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.
Clusters are most often created through close personal relationships between collaborating researchers and/or a legal agreement (often a funding agreement) that defines the boundaries of IP, licenses, and sharing. Those relationships and agreements appear crucial to establishing trust and a shared understanding of what constitutes fair practice within the context of the collaboration.
Truly open sharing - i.e, openly sharing resources such as data, reagents, and protocols as a resource for the community and object of collaboration - is rare. Many respondents felt that sharing data openly without shared standards was of limited usefulness. Sharing protocols, reagents, and know-how is more common because of greater utility, though these are usually shared after publication. Furthermore, sharing is delayed or avoided if the resources were thought to be “competitive”, either in that they could at some point be patented or would give competing researchers a publication advantage.
These results point to an interesting tension within the minds of researchers and are a key insight in the report. Encouraging open sharing will require both ensuring that resources are useful to others and reducing the need to protect resources that are seen to provide a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
There are a few basic conclusions we can draw from the themes summarized above:
- The lack of coordination and standardization in synthetic cell research is having a deleterious effect on the field.
- Nucleus is helping bridge the coordination and standardization gap.
- Despite near universal support for the work Nucleus is doing, the kind of collaboration and open sharing Nucleus envisions is not currently the norm within the synthetic cell research community.
- Open sharing is not yet the norm for two key reasons:
- Academic incentives that reward novelty and differentiation are misaligned with the effort required to make work available for reuse and interoperability across the field.
- Researchers face a tension between wanting to share resources that are useful and hesitating to share resources that could give others a competitive advantage.
The second post in this explainer series summarizes themes 4-6 in Part 1 of our report.
Once you are finished reading the second post, please take the time to fill out the short survey linked at the end of that post. Your input will help ensure that the insights shaping the future of Nucleus reflect the community's actual experience and priorities.