Synthetic Biology: From iGEM to the Artificial Cell

Synthetic Biology: From iGEM to the Artificial Cell
ISBN-10
9401793824
ISBN-13
9789401793827
Series
Synthetic Biology
Category
Medical
Pages
77
Language
English
Published
2014-09-09
Publisher
Springer
Authors
Juli Peretó, Manuel Porcar

Description

Synthetic Biology (SB) is a revolutionary discipline with a vast range of practical applications, but is SB research really based on engineering principles? Does it contributing to the artificial synthesis of life or does it utilise approaches sufficiently advanced to fall outside the scope of biotechnology or metabolic engineering? This volume reviews the development of SB and includes the major milestones of the discipline, the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches towards the construction of an artificial cell and the development of the “iGEM” competition. We conclude that SB is an emerging field with extraordinary technological potential, but that most research projects actually are an extension of metabolic engineering since the complexity of living organisms, their tight dependence on evolution and our limited knowledge of the interactions between the molecules, actually make life difficult to engineer.

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