The symposium is fully dedicated to research on the bottom-up assembly of a functioning synthetic cell from its molecular components.
Being able to build a synthetic cell is one of the big scientific challenges of the 21st century, as it will allow us to understand how life works. It will help shedding light on how life started on our planet, and on the conditions for life on other places in the universe.
At the same time, understanding the interactions between the different cellular mechanisms is the fundamental step towards being able to recreate these interactions, or to modify them. This will open up a new scientific and technological field that will boost the rapidly developing field of synthetic biology – thus advancing unprecedented new understanding and application areas in healthcare, medicine, biotechnology, food and power generation.

Aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers worldwide to present and discuss the latest results in cutting-edge research on the synthetic cell, and its future scientific and technological perspectives.

Further, the symposium aims at further building up on the community involved in this endeavour at the international level.
A couple of years ago, a group of European top researchers from the physics, chemistry and biology communities have started a dedicated European community with a common ambition to engineer synthetic life using a bottom‐up approach. Since then, this community has grown to include has a large number of world‐top researchers from various countries and disciplines, until now working on different aspects of minimal life rather independently.
This interdisciplinary community is now joining efforts to start a European Synthetic Cell Flagship Initiative (www.syntheticcell.eu) . During the symposium, time will also be reserved for an update on the progress of this initiative.

Symposium Venue
The symposium will be hosted at the Science Centre Delft at the Delft University of Technology.
Address: Mijnbouwstraat 120, 2628 RX Delft

Registration
The symposium is free of charge however registration is mandatory for organizational reasons.
Deadline for registration is 15 June 2018.
Due to time constraints, the programme provides only invited talks. For up-to-date information and to register, please check the website.

We look forward to welcoming you in Delft!

Sincerely,

The BaSyC Symposium organizing committee
Prof. Gijsje Koenderink (AMOLF)
Prof. Wilhelm Huck (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Prof. Pascale Daran-Lapujade (TU Delft)

And the Chair of the BaSyC Steering Committee
Prof. Marileen Dogterom (TU Delft)

Contact: Secr-BN-TNW@tudelft.nl