I know this is a long article-this is about half, but it is worth reading imo.


[link to www.wellcome.ac.uk]

Feature: 'Building block' biology

The new field of synthetic biology aims to make biology controllable, predictable and designable. Mun-Keat Looi asks if you can really engineer a biological organism and hears how a unique competition for undergraduates is helping the field gather momentum.

What if you could engineer an organism to do whatever you want: produce life-saving drugs cheaply, generate energy, or detect and clear waste from a polluted lake? And what if building that organism was like constructing a model using toy bricks or piecing together an electronic circuit? Welcome to the world of synthetic biology.

"The theory is that we now know enough about biological systems to be able to start putting them together," says Dr Gos Micklem, Director of the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute. "At that point it becomes relevant to apply engineering principles."

The essence of synthetic biology is to make biology controllable, predictable and designable. A 2009 report from the Royal Academy of Engineering defined it as an attempt to "design and engineer biologically based parts, novel devices and systems as well as redesign existing, natural biological systems".

By producing standard biological parts, scientists can assemble synthetic DNA circuits that produce specific functions within cells, like putting together transistors or capacitors in electronics. Through this, researchers hope to build organisms with an efficiency that promises benefits in a variety of fields.

Take drug development and production, for example. One of the biggest achievements in synthetic biology to date is the engineering of yeast cells to produce a precursor of the antimalarial drug artemisinin, which is expensive to produce when derived naturally from the plant sweet wormwood.

This landmark, by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, showed the power of synthetic biology. Because yeast is used widely in industry (for brewing, among other things), the method could be widened to an industrial scale, bringing down the cost of the drug. Moreover, because the artemisinin-producing yeast is engineered from controllable parts, it could make it easier to create new variants of the drug that can overcome resistance mechanisms in the malaria parasite.

"The standard parts approach broadens the horizons for us to use biology in different ways," says Professor Richard Kitney, co-Director of the new Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London. "And it is not application-specific. It can be applied to a whole range of fields, from biofuels to pharmaceuticals."
iGEM

When you have, as Kitney puts it, a "paradigm shift in how you approach genetic engineering", how do you explore the possibilities it offers, not to mention build a critical mass of scientists who can expand the nascent field? That's where iGEM comes in.

Started in 2003, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition sets university teams from all over the world a simple challenge: if you could make anything, what would you make?

"It's the opportunity to make things, design things of your own choice and test them out - a very fundamental human activity," says Randy Rettberg of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Director of iGEM.

Diagram of Cambridge 2009 iGEM project. Dipstick wells contain genetically engineered E. coli. When the sensor detects the substance it sends a signal to the tuner - this ensures that pigment is produced only when the concentration is above a certain threshold (which can be ‘tuned’ to different levels). Each well contains different bacteria tuned to react to different concentrations - higher concentrations activate more wells along the dipstick and warning colours can be used to indicate unsafe levels.

Each team is given a set of parts from MIT's 'BioBricks' Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an open-access archive being developed by synthetic biologists worldwide.

After a crash course in basic biology, the teams use the ten or so weeks over the summer to come up with an idea, design it, model it, build it and test it in the lab, before presenting the final results at a showpiece event at MIT in November.

It's a daunting task, but one that teams consistently rise to. Successful ideas range from bacteria that detect arsenic in water to a 'clutch' mechanism allowing you to control the movement of bacteria.

In 2009, the competition involved 120 universities worldwide. The Imperial College London team placed fourth overall with their idea of creating a bacterial pill for ingestion that would manufacture specific therapeutic proteins and then encapsulate itself to form a 'micro-pill'. "The overall aim was to design a modular system that could be adapted to produce a variety of drugs," says Kitney.

But the competition was won by the University of Cambridge team, who provided a simple, elegant engineering solution to an everyday problem. The aim was create a simple visual signal to represent something detected by a biosensor, such as the arsenic detector developed by a University of Edinburgh team in a previous iGEM competition.

They plundered simple, known metabolic pathways from different organisms, using different combinations in E. coli to produce a variety of coloured pigments: orange and red from carotenoids, brown from melanin, violet from violacein and green by knocking out a gene in the violacein pathway. The team created a number of different colour readouts, as well as sensitive tuners that allow the system to respond precisely to input from different sensors.

Imagine you have a dipstick with a range of wells along it, each containing different E. coli tuned to respond to different signal strengths (the concentration of heavy metals in the environment, for instance), and each producing a different coloured pigment in response to that. Testing a water sample will produce a kind of 'live barchart' on the dipstick in rainbow colours, with the well containing the most sensitive bacteria at the base of the bar chart, and progressively less sensitive bacteria further up.

"Our hope is to take our parts along with the biosensors that people like the Edinburgh team have produced and put them together for use in the field," says Micklem.