Building a living cell from scratch requires overcoming a bottleneck that has remained unresolved despite decades of progress: orchestrating the spatiotemporal integration of core functional modules. To tackle this barrier, the SynCell Asia Initiative outlines a strategy for developing core functional modules followed by their systems-level integration through the establishment of a centralized, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biofoundry.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the Asian Synthetic Biology Association (ASBA) and the Global Biofoundries Alliance (GBA) for providing the collaborative frameworks that led to the inception of the SynCell Asia Initiative. We thank all participants of the inaugural SynCell Asia Initiative in 2023 and the following workshops of 2024 and 2025 at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences for their foundational discussions. The development of this roadmap was supported by funding from National Natural Science Foundation of China (32488301) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB0480000, 321GJHZ2024219BS) to C.L.
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C.L. led the overall conceptualization and leadership of the SynCell Asia Initiative. C.L., Z.D., D.K., M.W.C., K.S., D.-M.K. and B.-K.C. coordinated the roadmap development and organized the consortium workshops. Z.D., M.F., M.L. and N.L. wrote the original draft. B.-K.C. contributed to manuscript editing. All authors participated in reviewing and revising the manuscript and approved the final version for submission.
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Dai, Z., Aoki, W., Chaiyen, P. et al. A framework for building a synthetic cell from the SynCell Asia Initiative. Nat Biotechnol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-026-03153-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-026-03153-w
