Scalable Synthetic Biology for Engineering Beyond the Bioreactor

Our current ability to engineer biological circuits is hindered by design cycles that are costly in terms of time and money, with constructs failing to operate as desired, or evolving away from the desired function once deployed. Synthetic biologists seek to understand biological design principles and use them to create technologies that increase the efficiency of the genetic engineering design cycle. Central to the approach is the creation of biological parts - encapsulated functions that can be composited together to create new pathways with predictable behaviors. We have defined five desirable characteristics of biological parts - independence, reliability, tunability, orthogonality and composability. We demonstrate these concepts with examples of controllers of gene expression that exercise these properties and point to how the engineering goals of synthetic biology can be met.

We suggest that the creation of appropriate sets of families of parts with these properties is a prerequisite for efficient, predictable engineering of new function in cells and will enable a large increase in the sophistication of genetic engineering applications. We further argue that the true power of such a framework is only realized when engineering the complex behaviors of cells, such as required for operation beyond the bioreactor and biosynthetic operations. We describe our efforts in such engineering viruses and bacteria for HIV and cancer therapies respectively.

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Room 106