Synthetic cells are a powerful tool for designing and building biotechnology. Assembling cells “bottom-up” from individually purified components allows us to build defined systems and test every part, enabling modular, scaleable engineering.
Building a synthetic cell from scratch involves three main processes:
Nucleus aims to provide a single, integrated site providing all the open protocols, materials, and tools required to support these processes.
We divide each Nucleus release into four broad categories:
Container: the means to separate the inside of a synthetic cell from its environment.
Cytosol: the mixture within a synthetic cell.
Content: biological programs which operate in the synthetic cell.
Synthetic Cell: containers, cytosols, and content combined together (”integrated”) into a particular working cell.
You can read more about each category below. For a more detailed discussion of the current status of Nucleus and its contents, please see What’s new in v0.2.0.
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Containers separate the interior of synthetic cells (cytosol and DNA) from the exterior environment.
What’s in Container:
The process of putting these interior contents inside a container is called “encapsulation”. There are many types of containers and multiple ways to encapsulate things for any given type of container.
Nucleus currently includes one type of container: lipid vesicles (or liposomes).
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Cytosol is the aqueous mixture of all the molecules that you want inside your cell.
What’s in Cytosol:
Cytosols can be very simple (e.g., water plus dye) or extraordinarily complex (e.g., cell lysate). Cytosols provide the molecular machinery and resources for a synthetic cell to work. In order for your cell to do what you want, you have to pick the right cytosol.