This post shares what we heard when we asked the synthetic cell research community whether Conscience's 2025-26 study and the blog posts summarizing it accurately reflected their experience. The survey is part of the same follow-on community engagement process outlined on our Conscience community engagement page, where you can find the full report, prior posts in the series, and background on how your feedback shapes Nucleus's future.
Below, we share how closely the community felt those themes matched their own experience, and what it means for the next stage of engagement around Nucleus.
In April 2026, Conscience prepared a series of blog posts for b.next to summarize the major findings of our 2025 report on collaboration, standardization, and open science in the synthetic cell research community. Alongside these posts we shared a survey so that members of the research community could anonymously provide feedback on whether the report and posts accurately reflect their experience. This post briefly breaks down what we heard.
Who We Heard From
We received 8 responses. These respondents represented a range of career stages and research specializations.
- Seven were from academic institutions, one from a non-profit.
- The respondents' experience ranged from trainees to 30+ years post Ph.D.
- 7 were from the US, 1 from the EU.
- 5 were current Nucleus users.
What We Heard
There was near unanimous agreement that the report was accurate. 5 respondents rated the report 4/5 on a 5-point accuracy scale, while the remaining 3 rated it 5/5.
“I thought the summary was pretty accurate, at least it reflects my views on these questions. They also confirm my suspicion that there is a wide range of views and understanding on open science.” - Bottom-Up Syn. Cell Biologist, 10-20 years post-PhD
The survey also asked respondents to provide feedback on the major themes identified in the initial report. Here is an overview of the results:
- Is field-level coordination is crucial for advancing synthetic cell research?
- 5 strongly agree, 3 somewhat agree
- Are there significant reproducibility and standardization issues in synthetic cell research?
- 5 strongly agree, 3 somewhat agree
- Did the blog posts and report accurately capture collaboration and sharing practices in synthetic cell research?
- 5 strongly agree, 3 somewhat agree
- How familiar are you with open science?
- Not familiar (1), general awareness but limited practice (4), familiar and apply some practices (1), open science is central to my work (2)
- Motivations for and barriers to participating in open science are accurately captured?
- 4 somewhat agree, 4 strongly agree
The majority of respondents provided further, detailed feedback about the themes addressed above. Here are the key takeaways:
- Some primary barriers to advancing synthetic cell research include a lack of coordination and standardization in the field as well as the underlying difficulty of the science itself.
- The main barriers to practicing open science are incentives and lack of resources, in particular lack of dedicated funding and lack of time. The failure to recognize shared outputs in rewards and recognition and worries about providing tools to competing labs were also expressed, though less so than the funding and resource barriers.
Conclusions and Next Steps
There are two crucial elements to recognize at this point. The first is that, at least according to the respondents here, the findings in the initial report were accurate. This means that the assumptions derived from the initial report continue to hold true, giving b.next some solid ground as it plans for the future. The second is that Nucleus, both as a platform and as a community, is well situated to tackle at least some of these major concerns by providing a common forum for standards development, creating incentives by enabling contributors to be acknowledged when shared resources are used (e.g., through citing Dev Notes), and performing the crucial but underrecognized (to quote a respondent “boring”) work of validating standards. Given the complexity of biology, and synthetic cell research in particular, this work is going to be necessary to drive the field forward.
Based on these results, b.next is in a good position to move onto the next stage of community engagement, where it will propose potential models for the future governance of Nucleus and its relationship with b.next. Over the next two months b.next will be releasing a series of posts describing potential visions for that future.
If you want to provide feedback on these results, the initial report, or any other aspect of these community engagement efforts you can reach out to b.next either in person or at build@bnext.bio or to Conscience at dylan.roskams-edris@conscience.ca. No identifying information associated with feedback sent to Conscience will be shared with b.next without the explicit permission of the person who sent it.