Synthetic biology: old wine in new bottles with an emerging language that ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous? (original) (raw)
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Synthetic biology: Novel approaches for microbiology
International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, 2015
In the past twenty years, molecular genetics has created powerful tools for genetic manipulation of living organisms. Whole genome sequencing has provided necessary information to assess knowledge on gene function and protein networks. In addition, new tools permit to modify organisms to perform desired tasks. Gene function analysis is speed up by novel approaches that couple both high throughput data generation and mining. Synthetic biology is an emerging field that uses tools for generating novel gene networks, whole genome synthesis and engineering. New applications in biotechnological, pharmaceutical and biomedical research are envisioned for synthetic biology. In recent years these new strategies have opened up the possibilities to study gene and genome editing, creation of novel tools for functional studies in virus, parasites and pathogenic bacteria. There is also the possibility to re-design organisms to generate vaccine subunits or produce new pharmaceuticals to combat mult...
2008
This review was commissioned by a working group of the Bioscience for Society Strategy (BSS) Panel of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). BBSRC is not responsible for the views expressed in the report or the accuracy of its content. These are solely the responsibility of the authors.
2nd Congress on Applied Synthetic Biology in Europe (Málaga, Spain, November 2013)
New Biotechnology, 2014
The second meeting organised by the EFB on the advances of applied synthetic biology in Europe was held in Málaga, Spain in November 2013. The potential for the broad application of synthetic biology was reflected in the five sessions of this meeting: synthetic biology for healthcare applications, tools and technologies for synthetic biology, production of recombinant proteins, synthetic plant biology, and biofuels and other small molecules. Outcomes from the meeting were that synthetic biology offers methods for rapid development of new strains that will result in decreased production costs, sustainable chemical production and new medical applications. Additionally, it also introduced novel ways to produce sustainable energy and biofuels, to find new alternatives for bioremediation and resource recovery, and environmentally friendly foodstuff production. All the above-mentioned advances could enable biotechnology to solve some of the major problems of Society. However, while there are still limitations in terms of lacking tools, standardisation and suitable host organisms, this meeting has laid a foundation providing cutting-edge concepts and techniques to ultimately convert the potential of synthetic biology into practice.
Synthetic Biology: new and emerging issues
The synthetic biology is the application of science, technology and engineering to facilitate and accelerate the design and engineer (manufacture and or modification) biologically based parts or genetic materials, novel devices and systems in living organism to alter living or non-living materials. (European Commission, 2014). Synthetic biology includes the “de novo” synthesis of genetic material and an engineering-based approach to develop components, organisms and products; and, builds on modern biotechnology methodologies and techniques such as high throughput DNA technologies and bioinformatics. Synthetic biology aims to design and engineer biologically based parts, novel devices and systems as well as redesigning existing, natural biological systems (RAE, 2009).
Editorial introduction for the Synthetic Biology thematic issue
New Biotechnology, 2014
Synthetic biology strives to develop organisms, enzymes, and processes that do not occur naturally to solve specific biotechnological problems. Often this requires genetic engineering to change a natural process, or to combine genes from different sources to create new ones. This volume includes examples not only of these traditional approaches, but also illustrates how some problems can be solved chemically or biochemically without genetic manipulation. Topics covered therefore range from exploitation of genomic or gene regulation data gleaned from systems biology to the production of nanoparticles at one extreme of scale to biodiesel to replace our dependence upon fossil fuels at the opposite extreme. This introduction sets current synthetic biology within the context of the European regulatory framework within which we must operate. Attention is also drawn to the emerging language that describes it.
2016
Synthetic biology is often misunderstood as creation of artificial life or new biology using principles different from those of extant organisms around us. But, fundamentally, the field is about engineering biology in a more efficient and effective way, and endowing new functions in existing organisms using a more refined and predictable approach. Thus, synthetic biology as encapsulated by the field it helps defined, is enhanced recombinant DNA technology, an example of which is modular and orthogonal “standard swappable biological parts”. But, as the field grows and matures, various “allied” fields are subsumed into it such as metabolic engineering, protein engineering, directed evolution, origins of life research, and systems biology, which in totality represents a new perspective of how engineering principles can be utilized to expand, in scope and depth, the realms of questions that biology ask. Two parallel approaches, directed evolution and de novo protein design, are frequent...
A new frontier in Synthetic Biology: automated design of small RNA devices in bacteria
RNA devices provide synthetic biologists with tools for manipulating post-transcriptional regulation and conditional detection of cellular biomolecules. The use of computational methods to design RNA devices has improved to the stage where it is now possible to automate the entire design process. These methods utilize structure prediction tools that optimize nucleotide sequences, together with fragments of known independent functionalities. Recently, this approach has been used to create an automated method for the de novo design of riboregulators. Here, we describe how it is possible to obtain riboregulatory circuits in prokaryotes by capturing the relevant interactions of RNAs inside the cytoplasm using a physicochemical model. We focus on the regulation of protein expression mediated by intraor intermolecular interactions of small RNAs (sRNAs), and discuss the design of riboregulators for other functions. The automated design of RNA devices opens new possibilities for engineering fully synthetic regulatory systems that program new functions or reprogram dysfunctions in living cells.
Journal of Biotechnology, 2006
The successful completion of the Human Genome Project and other sequencing projects opened the door for another quantum jump in science advancement. The most important public sequence databases are doubling in size every 18 months. By revealing the genetic program of many organisms, these efforts endow biologists with the ability to study the basic information of life in toto as an initial step toward a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of entire organisms. We review the area of synthetic biology, defined as the making and use of biosystems founded on the chemical synthesis of the coding DNA (and potentially RNA). The recent developments discussed here introduce a rich source of oligonucleotides to the field: in situ synthesised microarrays, which in fact represent nothing else but matrix nucleic acid synthesisers. With this new way of producing the oligonucleotides used in the making of synthetic genes in a very cost-effective manner, the field of synthetic biology can be expected to change dramatically in the next decade. Synthetic genes will then be the tools of choice to obtain any sequence at any time in any laboratory.