Synthetic Biology 101

What is Synthetic Biology? - Continued

Additional Definitions

"Synthetic Biology is a new approach to engineering biology, with an emphasis on technologies to write DNA. Recent advances make the de novo chemical synthesis of long DNA polymers routine and precise. Foundational work, including the standardization of DNA-encoded parts and devices, enables them to be combined to create programs to control cells. With the development of this technology, there is a concurrent effort to address legal, social and ethical issues."

Source: SB4.0

"Our overall long term goal is to help make biology easy to engineer, an area of research known as synthetic biology.”

Source: Drew Endy - Endy Research Lab

"Synthetic biology is an emerging research area that focuses on the design and fabrication of biological organisms/systems that do not already exist in the natural world or the re-design and fabrication of existing biological organisms/systems....Synthetic biology studies how to build artificial biological systems for engineering applications...Synthetic biology focuses on ways of taking parts of natural biological systems, characterizing and simplifying them, and using them as a component of a highly unnatural, engineered, biological system."

Source: Synthetic Biology.org

"Synthetic biology aims to design and build new biological parts and systems or to modify existing ones to carry out novel tasks."

Source: Note from the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology

"Synthetic biology is the engineering of biological components and systems that do not exist in nature and the re-engineering of existing biological elements; it is determined on the intentional design of artificial biological systems, rather than on the understanding of natural biology."

Source: SYNBIOLOGY Project

"Synthetic biology is becoming one of the hottest new fields of biology, with the potential to no less than revolutionize the way we do biotechnology today. By applying the toolbox of engineering disciplines to biology, a whole set of potential applications become possible ranging very widely across scientific and engineering disciplines."

Source: Synbiosafe project

"Synthetic biology is an emerging form of science and engineering that aims at the design and construction of (new) biological systems."

Source: 3rd International Conference on synthetic biology