Explore videos about synthetic biology on YouTube

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things.\r\n\r\nIf that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.\r\n\r\n"Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Canton, Labno, and Endy describe the process of refinement and characterization leading to the BBa_F2620 datasheet, which may serve as a starting template for producing many standardized genetically encoded objects.

Shetty, Endy, and Knight explain their expansion of the BioBricks method of assembly to the engineering of vectors, which expands the possibilities for standardization

Bacteria can sense their environment, distinguish between cell types, and deliver proteins to eukaryotic cells. Here, we engineer the interaction between bacteria and cancer cells to depend on heterologous environmental signals. We have characterized invasin from Yersinia pseudotuburculosis as an output module that enables Escherichia coli to invade cancer-derived cells, including HeLa, HepG2, and U2OS lines. To environmentally restrict invasion, we placed this module under the control of heterologous sensors.

The mid-nineteenth century saw the development of a radical new direction in chemistry: instead of simply analyzing existing molecules, chemists began to synthesize them--including molecules that did not exist in nature. The combination of this new synthetic approach with more traditional analytical approaches revolutionized chemistry, leading to a deep understanding of the fundamental principles of chemical structure and reactivity and to the emergence of the modern pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

Eukaryotic cells mobilize the actin cytoskeleton to generate a remarkable diversity of morphological behaviours, including motility, phagocytosis and cytokinesis. Much of this diversity is mediated by guanine nucleotide exchange factors (GEFs) that activate Rho family GTPases-the master regulators of the actin cytoskeleton. There are over 80 Rho GEFs in the human genome (compared to only 22 genes for the Rho GTPases themselves), and the evolution of new and diverse GEFs is thought to provide a mechanism for linking the core cytoskeletal machinery to a wide range of new control inputs.

Synthetic biology is a rapidly evolving field, which is based on the exciting proposition of applying our deepening understanding of biological system to technical problems, creating de novo solutions synthetically. Such solutions can be new features of existing living systems - mostly bacteria - but also the construction of entirely new organisms, such as the Mycoplasma bacterium based on a minimal genome created by Craig Venter.\r\n\r\nAt the basis of synthetic biology is the ability to create components of biological systems artificially and in a highly efficient way.

Our current ability to engineer biological circuits is hindered by design cycles that are costly in terms of time and money, with constructs failing to operate as desired, or evolving away from the desired function once deployed. Synthetic biologists seek to understand biological design principles and use them to create technologies that increase the efficiency of the genetic engineering design cycle. Central to the approach is the creation of biological parts--encapsulated functions that can be composited together to create new pathways with predictable behaviors.

Efforts to manipulate living organisms have raised the question of whether engineering principles of hierarchy, abstraction and design can be applied to biological systems. Here, we consider the practical challenges to controlling living organisms that must be surmounted, or at least managed, if synthetic biology and cellular bioengineering are to be productive.