Team:WITS-South Africa

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Synthetic biology is a revolutionary, dynamic field resulting from the fusion of engineering and molecular biology that has the potential to impact many facets of society. It is an inter-disciplinary field involving chemists, biologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and even philosophers. This dynamic field can also be defined as the use of artificial molecules to reproduce emergent behaviour from natural biology, with the goal of creating artificial life forms or otherwise to seek interchangeable biological parts with the intention of assembling them into devices or systems that function in a manner not found in nature (Shmidt). Because humans are living, biological entities - the greatest benefits of synthetic biology may result from its application to medicine.

 

Our project attempts to create an artificial biological system to detect a pathogen, namely human papillomavirus (HPV.)