Talking Synthetic Biology — Launch of Synthetic Biology Dialogue Report
Venter does it again — Landmark paper published by the J. Craig Venter Institute
Redesigning ribosomes — Nature paper by the Chin lab
Fernan Federici reflects on the growing community of researchers interested in plant synthetic biology.
The fourth international conference on Synthetic Biology (SB4.0) was recently held at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. With almost twice the number of attendees compared to SB3.0 in Zurich, SB4.0 saw the main leaders in the field congregate to share their work through 3 days of very exciting talks, workshops and poster exhibition. Main topics of focus in the sessions included biomedicine, biofuels, genetic circuits design, the iGEM competition, minimal cell construction and synthetic genomics.
In addition, SB4.0 presented some novel research with respect to previous SBX.0 conferences. A new session entirely dedicated to Synthetic Plant Biology was presented. It was very relevant to our group to share and interact with other plant researchers starting out in synthetic biology. Although the state of the field for the plant community is less advanced than for its microbial counterpart, a series of very interesting talks demonstrated the great potential of engineering genetic circuits in plants. Despite the lack of a registry of parts for plants and the challenge of working with an extra level of organization in the abstraction hierarchy, synthetic plant biology promises to be a very exciting area of work and many microbial researchers showed their interest in it.
Another point of interest at SB4.0 (and SB3.0) was to see how synthetic biology is a discipline that is still self-organizing. SB4.0 showed that differentiating Synthetic Biology from other disciplines such as genetic or metabolic engineering is more than a matter of identity. Whereas synthetic biology proposes the use of standardised interchangeable parts, most of the projects presented in SB4.0 were still developed by groups using their own parts. This issue clearly demonstrates that we are still very much in the very early stages of the discipline, and that a general consensus regarding standardisation of biological parts remains to be achieved. So far, only the iGEM competition and a few research groups in US have successfully shown that standardisation and abstraction in biology can be possible. Unfortunately, only a couple of parts and devices have been thoroughly described.
Standardisation is an issue with which our network has been particularly focused on. One member of our network, Kim de Mora, presented his work related to promoter characterisation during the workshop on standardization of biological parts. I also found particularly interesting the talk given by Jason Kelly about promoter activity measurements, which is very similar to our ratiometric assay for plant promoters. A relative measurement of each promoter with respect to a well-known promoter could facilitate the description of these parts.
Finally, I found the talk given by Sidney Brenner particularly interesting — he suggested renaming synthetic biology as “molecular engineering”. Molecular engineering would better reflect the actual aim of our community, which is applying an engineering doctrine to Biology and not merely seeking the ‘synthesis’ of new biological forms, synthetic life, or artificial organisms. Probably, the word ‘synthetic’ is not the most appropriate term because it could refer to any discipline in which a synthetic product is developed.
Unfortunately, due to the large number of overlapping sessions, I couldn’t attend many of the talks regarding social, legal and ethics aspects of synthetic biology, with results as relevant as any of the projects presented in SB4.0.
The SynBiostandards Network funding gave networkers the opportunity to share ideas with the rest of the international community and to discuss more informally about synthetic biology.
