Release:
Welcome to Nucleus — an open source package of protocols, tools, and biological materials for building synthetic cells that just work.
Nucleus was born out of our shared frustrations with engineering synthetic cells: Why does it take months to years to reproducibly make liposomes containing different cytosols? Why aren’t there plasmids and protocols available that just work out of the box for building with and on top of PURE? Why aren’t there easy-to-use tools and documentation that include the “synthetic cell guild knowledge" only found by talking directly with experts?
After years of asking these questions, it became clear that we needed a dedicated effort to upgrade our shared capabilities and expand the synthetic cell community. Incredible work on synthetic cell engineering is coming from around the world with increasing pace — what could we achieve together if we could quickly and reliably integrate and build on each other's efforts? Success for Nucleus is safely and equitably bringing the world into the full potential of synthetic cell engineering now — making it simple to build cells from scratch that are more capable than existing cells within a few years instead of decades.
As such, we’re happy to share that our first release, Nucleus v0.1.0, is now live. Head to our Getting Started page to learn more and our release notes to see what’s available and what’s in the works. Around 30 groups have expressed interest in receiving the OpenMTA Nucleus DNA collection — which includes 84 plasmids encoding PURE genes, measurement reporters, modules, and MoClo parts. We’re still working on validating the full collection and making it easily accessible — please shoot us an email if you’d like to get your hands on the first release and we’ll work to ship it to you as soon as we can. Digital sequences are available on Github.
Nucleus is a living, growing object — expect continuous improvements and quick iterations. We’re already working on new upgrades to the DNA collection, protocols, and tooling for Nucleus v0.1.1, which we plan to release in March. You can follow our planned upgrades and status on our release notes page. If you’d like to contribute to the next release — and distribute your work or know-how broadly to the community — or you have thoughts on what we should work on next, please reach out to us directly. You can connect with us and others through the nucleus-discuss mailing list.
Thanks for joining Nucleus. We’re looking forward to working together to make synthetic cell engineering easy (and all of our lives a little happier). Happy holidays!