Engineering life through Synthetic Biology
Paras Chopra1,* and Akhil Kamma
Delhi College of Engineering, Bawana Road, New Delhi-110042, India
Email: paras.chopra@bt.dce.edu
"Synthetic Biology is an art of engineering new biological systems that don't exist in nature. It is also redesigning existing systems so as to understand their underlying mechanisms.
At a basic level, Synthetic Biology is breaking biological processes such as the production of a protein from a gene and then stitching the components to build a desired system that performs a particular function like oscillators which oscillate between producing a protein or not.
Synthetic Biology attempts to create living systems from the scratch and then endowing these systems with new and novel functions. The molecules used in these systems might be naturally occurring or artificially synthesized. The mode of production is not synthetic because the resulting compound is still produced biologically. The term synthetic comes from the fact that the compound is produced from an organism with a genetic code that is not ordinarily found in nature.
The term 'Synthetic Biology' was coined by Barbara Hobom while describing genetically engineered bacteria [1, 2]. However, the heavy emphasis on foundational technologies is an aspect which distinguishes it from genetic engineering."
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