The Max Planck Society and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research dedicate the research project MaxSynBio to bottom-up Synthetic Biology. 20 research groups from nine Max Planck Institutes across Germany, as well as the Department of Theology of the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Bordeaux, are involved. The project started on 1st of August 2014 and will run initially until the end of July 2020.