Schwille Petra, Diez Stefan
Biophysics/BIOTEC, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Crit Rev Biochem Mol Biol. 2009 Jul-Aug;44(4):223-42. doi: 10.1080/10409230903074549.
"Synthetic biology" is a concept that has developed together with, or slightly after, "systems biology". But while systems biology aims at the full understanding of large systems by integrating more and more details into their models, synthetic biology phrases different questions, namely: what particular biological function could be obtained with a certain known subsystem of reduced complexity; can this function be manipulated or engineered in artificial environments or genetically modified organisms; and if so, how? The most prominent representation of synthetic biology has so far been microbial engineering by recombinant DNA technology, employing modular concepts known from information technology. However, there are an increasing number of biophysical groups who follow similar strategies of dissecting cellular processes and networks, trying to identify functional minimal modules that could then be combined in a bottom-up approach towards biology. These modules are so far not as particularly defined by their impact on DNA processing, but rather influenced by core fields of biophysics, such as cell mechanics and membrane dynamics. This review will give an overview of some classical and some quite new biophysical strategies for constructing minimal systems of certain cellular modules. We will show that with recent advances in understanding of cytoskeletal and membrane elements, the time might have come to experimentally challenge the concept of a minimal cell.
“合成生物学”是一个与“系统生物学”一同发展或稍晚于它出现的概念。然而，系统生物学旨在通过将越来越多的细节整合到模型中来全面理解大型系统，而合成生物学提出了不同的问题，即：利用某个已知的、复杂度降低的子系统能够获得何种特定的生物学功能；这种功能能否在人工环境或转基因生物中进行操控或设计；如果可以，该如何实现？迄今为止，合成生物学最突出的表现形式是通过重组DNA技术进行微生物工程，采用从信息技术中借鉴的模块化概念。然而，越来越多的生物物理研究团队采用类似的策略来剖析细胞过程和网络，试图识别出功能性的最小模块，然后以自下而上的方式构建生物学体系。到目前为止，这些模块并非特别由其对DNA处理的影响来定义，而是受生物物理学的核心领域影响，如细胞力学和膜动力学。本综述将概述一些构建特定细胞模块最小系统的经典及全新生物物理策略。我们将表明，随着对细胞骨架和膜元件理解的最新进展，或许已到了通过实验挑战最小细胞概念的时候。
