A SHENZHEN-LED international team has unveiled Asia’s first decade-long master plan for building “synthetic cells,” a scientific milestone that could eventually allow humans to create artificial life from the ground up.

Led by Liu Chenli, director of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the initiative brings together over 100 labs from six countries: China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Their ambitious strategy was published last week in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology.

While traditional genetic engineering involves “editing” existing plants or animals, synthetic biology is more like building with biological Legos. Scientists use raw building blocks like DNA and proteins to assemble a basic, single-celled system that functions like a living organism.

Beyond the laboratory, this work seeks to solve one of the greatest mysteries in history: How does life emerge from non-living matter?

The roadmap follows a two-step journey: first, creating a “proto-cell” prototype — a basic biological “bubble” with a minimal genetic manual — and ultimately developing a fully independent “auto-cell” capable of building its own machinery and self-replicating.

For decades, researchers in the U.S. and Europe have made breakthroughs in creating individual parts of a cell — such as the outer membrane or specific gene sequences. However, putting all those parts together into a fully functional, self-growing unit remains a global “bottleneck.” To break through, the Asian consortium is using a high-tech approach. They are building an AI-powered “biofoundry” — a central facility in Shenzhen that prepares standardized biological parts. This allows research teams across Asia to collaborate like “distributed workstations,” sharing designs and testing results in real-time.

By pooling the expertise of over 100 labs, this initiative aims to turn a scientific dream into a sustainable reality. The roadmap provides a clear path forward for the next 10 years, positioning Asia as a global leader in the quest to understand — and recreate — the building blocks of life. (Xinhua)