Scientists from six Asian countries have launched an ambitious 10-year effort to build synthetic cells from non-living molecules, marking the region's first coordinated push to create an artificial single-celled biological system. The roadmap, published on May 26 in Nature Biotechnology and led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was developed through the SynCell Asia Initiative, which comprises more than 100 scientists from China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

Cells are typically studied outside the body under controlled laboratory conditions. However, conventional flat cell culture methods do not fully reproduce the complex three-dimensional environments that cells experience in living tissues. Tiny hydrogel capsules offer one way to culture cells in a confined three-dimensional space, allowing researchers to study how cells grow, organize and interact under more tissue-like conditions. Current methods to do this come with a high cost and a set of requirements that put such research out of reach to many.

What if a process we associate with aging actually helps the body heal? A study led by Mikolaj Ogrodnik, LBI Trauma, published in Nature Cell Biology, shows that cells enter a state of senescence within minutes to hours after an injury—and that this rapid response not only plays a key role in wound healing, but also changes the paradigm of how slowly senescence was expected to arise.

Decades of reliance on the antibiotic rifampicin have fueled the rise of drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). But as the bacterium mutates to protect itself from the drug, it also creates new weak points that other therapies could exploit. Now, a new study published in Nature Microbiology shows that the most common rifampicin-resistance mutation slows bacterial RNA polymerase, creating vulnerabilities that future combination therapies may be able to target.