Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Syst Biol Med. 2011 Jan-Feb;3(1):7-20. doi: 10.1002/wsbm.104.
The ability to manipulate living organisms is at the heart of a range of emerging technologies that serve to address important and current problems in environment, energy, and health. However, with all its complexity and interconnectivity, biology has for many years been recalcitrant to engineering manipulations. The recent advances in synthesis, analysis, and modeling methods have finally provided the tools necessary to manipulate living systems in meaningful ways and have led to the coining of a field named synthetic biology. The scope of synthetic biology is as complicated as life itself--encompassing many branches of science and across many scales of application. New DNA synthesis and assembly techniques have made routine customization of very large DNA molecules. This in turn has allowed the incorporation of multiple genes and pathways. By coupling these with techniques that allow for the modeling and design of protein functions, scientists have now gained the tools to create completely novel biological machineries. Even the ultimate biological machinery--a self-replicating organism--is being pursued at this moment. The aim of this article is to dissect and organize these various components of synthetic biology into a coherent picture.
操纵生物体的能力是一系列新兴技术的核心，这些技术旨在解决环境、能源和健康领域的重要和当前问题。然而，由于生物学的复杂性和相互关联性，它多年来一直抵制工程操作。最近在合成、分析和建模方法方面的进展终于提供了以有意义的方式操纵生命系统的必要工具，并导致了一个名为合成生物学的领域的诞生。合成生物学的范围和生命本身一样复杂——涵盖了许多科学分支和许多应用尺度。新的 DNA 合成和组装技术使常规定制非常大的 DNA 分子成为可能。这反过来又允许了多个基因和途径的整合。通过将这些与允许蛋白质功能建模和设计的技术相结合，科学家们现在已经获得了创建全新生物机器的工具。即使是终极的生物机器——自我复制的生物体——此刻也正在被追求。本文的目的是将合成生物学的这些不同组成部分分解并组织成一个连贯的画面。
