Team:UNAM-Genomics Mexico/About/Synthetic Biology

What is

Synthetic Biology has many definitions. Being a novel discipline, it has many approaches, logics, and philosophies. Here we briefly present some of them.

Wikipedia

"Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research that combines science and engineering. Synthetic biology encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines, and many different definitions exist. What they all have in common, however, is that they see synthetic biology as the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature."

SyntheticBiology.org

Synthetic Biology is:

A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and

B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Our View

We, the UNAM-Genomics_Mexico Team think Synthetic Biology is more a way of viewing biology than anything else. We see cells as hyper-complex machines composed of simple sub-machines. It is a form of thinking much like Systems Biology. As cells are therefore chassis for machinery, one can re-organize said machinery with parts from a different chassis, or create new parts to import into the chassis. In some ways, we think as engineers.

Of course, sooner or later we have to incorporate the biological perspective to explain the chaos inside the chassis, the reason why plasmids refuse to work, why cells refuse to grow...

Notes