0000000000505788
AUTHOR
Víctor De Lorenzo
The ten grand challenges of synthetic life
The construction of artificial life is one of the main scientific challenges of the Synthetic Biology era. Advances in DNA synthesis and a better understanding of regulatory processes make the goal of constructing the first artificial cell a realistic possibility. This would be both a fundamental scientific milestone and a starting point of a vast range of applications, from biofuel production to drug design. However, several major issues might hamper the objective of achieving an artificial cell. From the bottom-up to the selection-based strategies, this work encompasses the ten grand challenges synthetic biologists will have to be aware of in order to cope with the task of creating life i…
The long journey towards standards for engineering biosystems: Are the Molecular Biology and the Biotech communities ready to standardise?
Standards are the basis of technology: they allow rigorous description and exact measurement of properties, reliable reproducibility and a common “language” that enables different communities to work together. Molecular biology was in part created by physicists; yet, the field did not inherit the focus on the quantitation, the definition of system boundaries and the robust, unequivocal language that is characteristic of the other natural sciences. However, synthetic biology (SynBio) increasingly requires scientific, technical, operational and semantic standards for the field to become a full‐fledged engineering discipline with a high level of accuracy in the design, manufacturing and perfor…
Confidence, tolerance, and allowance in biological engineering: The nuts and bolts of living things
The emphasis of systems and synthetic biology on quantitative understanding of biological objects and their eventual re-design has raised the question of whether description and construction standards that are commonplace in electric and mechanical engineering are applicable to live systems. The tuning of genetic devices to deliver a given activity is generally context-dependent, thereby undermining the re-usability of parts, and predictability of function, necessary for manufacturing new biological objects. Tolerance (acceptable limits within the unavoidable divergence of a nominal value) and allowance (deviation introduced on purpose for the sake of flexibility and hence modularity, i.e. …