It's Synthetic

I am very excited about the opportunity to blog about biology on Scitable. Science is something that I am very passionate about, and I look forward to sharing this with all of you. First I would like to introduce myself. I am Eric Sawyer, an undergraduate biology student at a small liberal arts college. I have been fascinated by the natural world since I was a child, and now that I'm older I intend to pursue biology as a career.

I was introduced to the field of synthetic biology research about two years ago, and I have continued working on it intermittently since. I think synthetic biology has many qualities that make it particularly exciting, and I hope that you will come to the same conclusion over the coming weeks and months of reading my posts. But to get you started, I think it is appropriate to give you a taste of what synthetic biology is and how synthetic biologists think.

Synthetic biology is a relatively new field that aims to make engineering biological systems easier and broader in scope. It uses many of the same tools as "conventional" genetic engineering — synthetic biologists combine bits of DNA from different sources to perform a desired function. However, synthetic biology differs from conventional genetic engineering in a number of ways. For instance, synthetic biology emphasizes the use of standardized parts.

Much like the use of standard construction equipment allows contractors to pull from a supply of parts to match the blueprint of any house (e.g., two-by-fours of lumber, standard nail sizes and pipe fittings), synthetic biologists like to standardize their DNA parts to increase efficiency. A construction crew whose raw building materials were trees and lumps of metal would be much less efficient than their competition! Each job would require making completely new parts that could be applied to that particular job alone. Synthetic biologists strive to be like the wiser competition. By making DNA parts in a standard fashion, they can be used in future experiments and shared between laboratories around the world to accelerate the pace of discovery.

My own research experience has involved working with these DNA parts. The parts are literally bits of DNA that each performs a particular function, and they can be combined to form more complicated systems. I will go into more detail about this bottom-up approach to synthetic biology in future posts. However, I would also like to add that other synthetic biologists, most notably J. Craig Venter and his colleagues, do not use the parts-based approach. Instead they are concerned with whole genomes and organisms. I will be talking about this area of research in future posts as well.

I think that synthetic biology will have a major influence on 21st-century science. It is therefore crucial that the general public as well as other scientists are kept informed about the field. I hope that I can be a small part of this much larger effort.

Please feel free to post suggestions, questions, and the like in the comments section!

Image Credit: Endy (via Wikimedia)

References:

Endy, D. Foundations for engineering biology. Nature 438, 449–453 (2005), doi:10.1038/nature04342.