syntheticbio

Synthetic biologists are looking to analog, not digital, circuits to create cell-based calculators that can add, divide, and even perform algorithms.

A team of Yale undergraduates has discovered the structure of of the most powerful known antifreeze to date.

It sounds like science fiction but a team from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a method to make bacteria produce diesel on demand. While the technology still faces many significant commercialisation challenges, the diesel, produced by special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel.

Could synthetic biology be used to develop heat-resistant coral? Could it bring back over-exploited fish stocks? If the answer is yes...should we?

But worries persist about unintended consequences of tinkering with nature.

Synthetic biology has recently been at the center of the world’s attention as a new scientific and engineering discipline. It allows us to design and construct finely controllable metabolic and regulatory pathways, circuits, and networks, as well as create new enzymes, pathways, and even whole cells. With this great power of synthetic biology, we can develop new organisms that can efficiently produce new drugs to benefit human healthcare and superperforming microorganisms capable of producing chemicals, fuels, and materials from renewable biomass, without the use of fossil oil. Based on several successful examples reported, this commentary aims at peeking into the potential of synthetic biology.

MIT engineers have created synthetic biology circuits that can perform analog computations such as taking logarithms and square roots in living cells.

“It’s undergraduate research, but we’re not treated like undergraduates,” said 19-year-old Josh Leehan, a second-year biology student.

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

As research into synthetic biology increases, this map identifies companies, universities, research institutions, laboratories and other centers across the globe that are active in this emerging field.

Both bizarre and beneficial, the following article highlights some truly fascinating and pragmatic examples of modern genetic engineering.

An interview with the synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis

Kickstarter might be better known for funding films and hardware projects, but it’s now getting its first synthetic biology proposal. A Singularity University alum, a Stanford post-doc and a Stanford Ph.D. are looking to use synthetic biology and software from startup Genome Compiler to creating plants that glow.

Synthetic biology is often referred to as “the field of the future,” the foundation of fuels, materials, medicines, as well as the way we produce knowledge of biological systems. But while the self-consciously revolutionary language of synthetic biology declares a change of the industrial status quo, the metaphors we rely on are explicit references to the successful revolutions of past industrial technologies. The term synthetic biology echoes the successes of synthetic chemistry, while the guiding concept of standardization in genetic components is modeled on 19th century standardization of interchangeable parts. Industrial metaphors mix further as we climb the abstraction hierarchy; genetic parts are assembled to fit into a cellular chassis, creating logic gates and circuits that can compute biological information, leading to the control of cellular factories, rapidly designed, built, and commercialized on an “Ikea”-like scale.