Synthetic Biology: From iGEM to the Artificial Cell (SpringerBriefs in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Book 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 Front Matter....Pages i-xii What Is Synthetic Biology?....Pages 1-7 What Was Synthetic Biology?....Pages 9-22 What Is Life?....Pages 23-32 Strategies for Making Life....Pages 33-44 Synthetic Biology in Action....Pages 45-53 The iGEM Competition....Pages 55-62 Are We Doing Synthetic Biology?....Pages 63-68 Back Matter....Pages 69-77