Biological systems display a functional diversity, density and efficiency that make them a paradigm for synthetic systems. In natural systems, the cell is the elemental unit and efforts to emulate cells, their components, and organization have relied primarily on the use of bioorganic materials. Impressive advances have been made towards assembling simple genetic systems within cellular scale c...

Significant transformations in biological technique and biological work are taking place in the aftermath of genomics. While existing accounts of genomics and biotechnology contend that species differences and evolutionary histories have undergone 'flattening' by molecular techniques and concepts, analysis of design practices in synthetic biology suggests that vertical aggregations of biologica...

" Most of the significant work has been summarized in a number of reviews and articles. In these there was, of necessity, a good deal of simplification and omission of detail.. . With the passage of time, even I find myself accepting such simplified accounts. "

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. 1 Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs 2 or form visible patterns. 3 Cells that can count the number of times they divide. 4 A live polio virus " created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet. " 5 These are some of the remarkable, and occasio...

The ability to manipulate living organisms is at the heart of a range of emerging technologies that serve to address important and current problems in environment, energy, and health. However, with all its complexity and interconnectivity, biology has for many years been recalcitrant to engineering manipulations. The recent advances in synthesis, analysis, and modeling methods have finally prov...

If each of us conveys our idiosyncratic view of the elephant, then we, in communion, can imagine its wholeness (Ireland, 1997). An analogous process elucidates Molecular Systems Biology (MSB) and this journal is dedicated to it. The work of a scientist/engineer (seer for short) consists of discovery, modeling, perturbation, and invention. Cycling through these is a key practice of biology. Addi...

Herein, I track the evolution of synthetic biology from its earliest incarnations more than 50 years ago, through the DIYbio revolution, to the next 50 years.

Synthetic biology has become one of the most dynamic research fields in the life sciences. In reality, though, the term is used to cover a host of different approaches rather than a single defined discipline; these range from the large-scale assembly of DNA segments to the development of new tools and technology platforms, and to the search for the minimal cell and the origins of life. The evol...

In this issue, Leading Edge highlights synthetic biology, a field that is deepening our understanding of the design principles of life and increasing our mastery of biological systems for practical applications in biotechnology and medicine. Reports from the recent literature, discussed in this Synthetic Biology Select, include the rational design of a functional enzyme, an approach for creatin...

The term synthetic biology was first introduced by the French scientist Stéphane Leduc (1912), be it with a different meaning as today’s, and (it seems) in modern times by the Polish geneticist Waclaw Szybalski (1974). Putting aside priority questions it is true that the term gained popularity in mainstream science only in the year 2004 when the first international meeting, called Synthetic Bio...