Beyond divisions

Before they can construct a cell, researchers in synthetic biology must first build bridges between disciplines.

This Focus issue highlights the growth of synthetic biology as a vibrant and vigorous scientific discipline that has its roots firmly grounded in microbiology.

Realizing the ambitious goals of synthetic biology requires continued efforts in characterizing the foundations.

Synthetic biology is facing a tug of war over whether to patent its discoveries or embrace open-source innovation.

An engineered bacterium is able to copy DNA that contains unnatural genetic letters.

If synthetic biology is to thrive, the world needs to decide now how the field should be regulated and supported, says Volker ter Meulen.

Experts weigh in on the biggest obstacles in synthetic biology — from names to knowledge gaps — and what it will take to overcome them.

Authors discuss how synthetic biology approaches could be applied to assemble synthetic quasibiological systems able to replicate and evolve, illuminating universal properties of life and the search for its origins.

Synthetic biology involves the creation of biological systems for new applications by modifying and reassembling biological components. Two views are presented here on the best way to engineer these components so that they reliably generate organisms with desired traits.

One aim of synthetic biology is to generate complex synthetic organisms. Now, a stage in this process has been achieved in yeast cells — an entire yeast chromosome has been converted to a synthetic sequence in a stepwise manner.

The five bases found in nucleic acids define the 'alphabet' used to encode life on Earth. The construction of an organism that stably propagates an unnatural DNA base pair redefines this fundamental feature of life. See Letter p.385

In this Timeline article, Collins and colleagues chart the history of synthetic biology since its inception just over a decade ago, with a focus on both the cultural and scientific progress that has been made as well as on key breakthroughs and areas for future development.

This Perspective takes the reader through the important steps in bacterial genome assembly and activation and concludes with an outlook on how customized genomes may be achieved.

Non-coding RNA devices, such as CRISPR–Cas systems, riboswitches and RNA scaffolds, have emerged as a versatile class of genetic regulatory elements that are used in a broad range of synthetic biology applications. In this Review, Arkin and Qi discuss the design, engineering and application of synthetic non-coding RNA devices for microbial engineering.

Entry of the antimalarial drug precursor semi-synthetic artemisinin into industrial production is the first major milestone for the application of synthetic biology. In this Review, Paddon and Keasling discuss the metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches that were used to engineerEscherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiaeto synthesize a precursor of artemisinin, which should aid the development of other pharmaceutical products.

Much of synthetic biology research makes use of model organisms, such asEscherichia coli. Here, Víctor de Lorenzo and colleagues emphasize the need for a wider choice of model organisms and advocate the use of environmental Pseudomonasstrains as model organisms that possess the necessary metabolic traits required to meet current and future synthetic biology and biotechnological needs.

This Review discusses large-scale de novo DNA synthesis via oligos or arrays, describes gene assembly and error correction and considers applications for large-scale DNA synthesis.

This Review introduces tools to build transcriptional circuits and explains how the choice of different tools can affect circuit behavior and how its operation can be affected by the cellular host.

Triphosphates of hydrophobic nucleotides d5SICS and dNaM are imported into Escherichia coli by an exogenous algal nucleotide triphosphate transporter and then used by an endogenous polymerase to replicate, and faithfully maintain over many generations of growth, a plasmid containing the d5SICS–dNaM unnatural base pair.

Raven calculates assembly plans for complex genetic constructs from thousands of parts. It integrates user feedback on failed intermediate assemblies to improve the final outcome.

Biotechnology is a central focus in efforts to provide sustainable solutions for the provision of fuels, chemicals and materials. On the basis of a recent open discussion, we summarize the development of this field, highlighting the distinct but complementary approaches provided by metabolic engineering and synthetic biology for the creation of efficient cell factories to convert biomass and other feedstocks to desired chemicals.

Protease competition is used to produce rapid and tunable coupling of genetic circuits, enabling a coupled clock network that can encode independent environmental cues into a single time series output, a form of frequency multiplexing in a genetic circuit context.

Ionic liquids (ILs) are important solvents in the microbial production of biofuels, but can inhibit microbial growth. Here, the authors transfer newly discovered IL-resistance genes from rain forest soil bacteria to E. coliand report growth and biofuel production at IL levels that are otherwise toxic to native strains.