Synthetic Biology: From iGEM to the Artificial Cell (SpringerBriefs in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 12)

Annotation 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 Foreword 7 Preface 9 Contents 11 1 What Is Synthetic Biology? 13 Abstract 13 1.1 Engineering Ideals and Synthetic Life 14 1.2 Challenges for Synthetic Life 16 References 19 2 What Was Synthetic Biology? 20 Abstract 20 2.1 Life 21 2.2 Spontaneous Generation 24 2.3 The Synthesis of Living Beings a Century Ago 26 2.4 Creating Life: Utopia and Propaganda 31 References 33 3 What Is Life? 34 Abstract 34 3.1 Why Wonder What Life Is? 35 3.2 A Single Example of Life 36 3.3 Real Is a Small Part of the Possible 37 3.4 Extant Is a Clue for the Extinct 39 3.5 Individual and Collective Life 39 3.6 To Be Alive or to Be a Living Being---That Is the Question 41 3.7 Awakening from the Cartesian Dream 41 References 43 4 Strategies for Making Life 44 Abstract 44 4.1 Frankenstein and Werker: Two Strategies to Make a Living Being 44 4.2 脌 la Frankenstein: Artificial Synthesis of Life or the Top-Down Approach 46 4.3 脌 la Werker: Synthesis of Artificial Life or the Bottom-up Approach 49 4.4 Synthesizing Life as We Do not Know It 52 References 54 5 Synthetic Biology in Action 56 Abstract 56 5.1 and Malaria to Begin 56 5.2 Playing God with a Chromosome? 58 5.3 Cell Circuitry 59 5.4 Cooling Down the Cool Engineer 59 5.5 Biofuels 61 5.6 or Public-Oriented Research in the Name of Synthetic Biology 62 5.7 Beyond Practical Uses 63 References 63 6 The iGEM Competition 65 Abstract 65 6.1 iGEM---Synthetic Biology for the Youngest Scientists 66 6.2 From Biobrick to Jamboree 67 6.3 The Outcome and the Future 70 References 72 7 Are We Doing Synthetic Biology? 73 Abstract 73 7.1 A Word on Genomes: Are We True Writers? 75 7.2 Is Life Engineerable? 76 7.3 Standards in Biology: The iGEM Competition 77 References 78 Postface 79 Author Index 82 Subject Index 84