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Taming the Beast of Biology: Synthetic Biology and Biological Systems Engineering
Author(s) -
Sven Panke
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
chimia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2673-2424
pISSN - 0009-4293
DOI - 10.2533/chimia.2020.402
Subject(s) - synthetic biology , scope (computer science) , the renaissance , systems biology , variety (cybernetics) , genome engineering , data science , computer science , biology , genome editing , microbiology and biotechnology , computational biology , nanotechnology , biochemical engineering , engineering ethics , genome , engineering , genetics , artificial intelligence , art , materials science , art history , gene , programming language
Despite the availability of a variety of ' -omics ' technologies to support the system-wide analysis of industrially relevant microorganisms, the manipulation of strains towards an economically relevant goal remains a challenge. Remarkably, our ability to catalogue the participants in and model ever more comprehensive aspects of a microorganism's physiology is now complemented by technologies that permanently expand the scope of engineering interventions that can be imagined. In fact, genome-wide editing and re-synthesis of microbial and even eukaryotic chromosomes have become widely applied methods. At the heart of this emerging system-wide engineering approach, often labelled ' Synthetic Biology ' , is the continuous improvement of large-scale DNA synthesis, which is put to two-fold use: (i) starting ever more ambitious efforts to re-write existing and coding novel molecular systems, and (ii) designing and constructing increasingly sophisticated library technologies, which has led to a renaissance of directed evolution in strain engineering. Here, we briefly review some of the critical concepts and technological stepping-stones of Synthetic Biology on its way to becoming a mature industrial technology.

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