The PACE project unites and integrates diverse bottom up approaches to artificial cells.
The most obvious approach is by combining chemical and physical intuition along with experience with biomimetic systems. This draws on a long tradition of research into the origin of life and early evolution, but augments it with our modern understanding of complex fluids and phase transitions so that a large part of the design process resides in the collective self-assembling properties of the physical system and not just in the choice of chemical reaction mechanisms.
The second and major approach pursued in PACE is via complementation and evolutionary optimization. Since the goal is to construct programmable cells, it is valuable to adopt a programmable approach to the process of constructing