As the world progresses from a fossil-fuel based economy to a more sustainable one, synthetic biology will become increasingly important for the production of high-value fine chemicals as well as low-value commodities in bulk. The integration of metabolomics and fluxomics within synthetic biology projects will be vital at all levels, including the initial design of the pathways to be generated,...

Following a successful panel discussion at last years' American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting, the first minisymposium in Synthetic Cell Biology was held at this years' annual meeting in Denver. This is an exciting first for the society, and the attendance clearly supported the interest of cell biologists in applying the concepts of synthetic biology to the understanding and engineeri...

Synthetic biology is interpreted as the engineering-driven building of increasingly complex biological entities for novel applications. Encouraged by progress in the design of artificial gene networks, de novo DNA synthesis and protein engineering, we review the case for this emerging discipline. Key aspects of an engineering approach are purpose-orientation, deep insight into the underlying sc...

Synthetic biology is a new research field that comprises many different projects, approaches and definitions, which, at first glance, do not apparently have much in common. These approaches include the generation of bioengineered bacteria, artificial protocells or synthetic genomes, as well as pure in silico models of protocells or regulatory and metabolic pathways, all of which are products of...