This talk will highlight NSF national synthesis center for emergence in molecular and cellular sciences (NCEMS) initiatives to integrate the biophysics community into the center’s synthesis efforts, and how you can get involved at this dawn of synthesis research in biophysics. There are over 300 petabytes of publicly available molecular and cellular biology data, a volume that doubles every 18 months. Yet, less than 1% of these data are reused beyond their original publication. Synthesis research—the integration and reuse of publicly available data—are poised to accelerate discovery in molecular and cellular biophysics by connecting diverse data sets with theories and methods from across disciplines. As transcriptomic, proteomic, and other molecular data sets continue to expand exponentially, a synthesis approach offers a means to maximize the value of existing resources, including for the development of AI models and biotechnology applications. NCEMS, founded in 2024, is catalyzing community-scale synthesis in biophysics by creating working Groups—virtual teams that unite experts across disciplines to address cross-cutting questions—and by lowering barriers for non-experts to reuse existing data. Supported by NCEMS staff scientists with expertise in computational biophysics, bioinformatics, data science, and machine learning, the first cohort of working groups is training AI models to detect novel proteins, regulatory mechanisms, and bacterial cell states, and to predict how these systems respond to environmental changes. Subsequent talks in this symposium will present examples of such synthesis efforts.
Daniel A. Nissley (Sun,) studied this question.