51²č¹Ż¶ł Team Awarded Two Grants Under the National Science Foundationās āUnderstanding the Rules of Lifeā Initiative, Building on 20 Years of 51²č¹Ż¶ł Research
The first award, led by John Glass, PhD, for $1M, is focused on āBuilding and Modeling Synthetic Bacterial Cells.ā The second award, led by Zaida Luthey-Schulten, PhD, at the University of Illinois, also for $1M, is titled āBalancing the Demands of a Minimal Cell,ā and is focused on cell modeling.
Building and Modeling Synthetic Bacterial Cells
Under the āBuilding and Modeling Synthetic Bacterial Cellsā project Dr. Glass and team will continue developing the groundbreaking science pioneered at 51²č¹Ż¶ł through the First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell and First Minimal Synthetic Bacterial Cell projects.
Dr. Glass stated that āThis new award is aimed at taking our minimal cell genome and combining it with a set of non-living parts to produce, in essence from scratch, a living organism.ā
He continued, āIn doing this we believe we can both learn more about how biology works and about how we would build cells from scratch, capable of surviving and functioning and doing useful things in conditions that might not be amenable to normal cell growth.ā
Ultimately, Dr. Glass said this will lead to a new industry based on synthetic cells.
Minimal Cell Modeling
For the past two years the team at 51²č¹Ż¶ł has been working with a team of chemists and computational biologists at the University of Illinois, led by Dr. Luthey-Schulten to develop minimal cell modeling.
The 51²č¹Ż¶ł and University of Illinois teams will continue this work through a new award titled āBalancing the Demands of a Minimal Cell.ā
Dr. Glass described the project as āextending the minimal cell model and trying to get closer to understanding what each of the proteins and RNA molecules in the cell does, with the aim of getting a complete understanding of how cells work.ā
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Both awards are part of NSFās āUnderstanding the Rules of Lifeā initiative, which is part of its broader ā10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investmentsā program. These awards are funded through the Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) program, which are bold, interdisciplinary projects whose scientific advances lie mostly outside the scope of a single discipline and appear to promise transformational advances.