Porcar Manuel, Peretó Juli
Institut Cavanilles de Biodiversitat i Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat de València, Apartat, Postal 22085, 46071 Valencia, Spain ; Fundació General de la Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain ; Departament de Genètica, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
Syst Synth Biol. 2012 Dec;6(3-4):79-83. doi: 10.1007/s11693-012-9101-3. Epub 2012 Dec 5.
Synthetic Biology is a singular, revolutionary scenario with a vast range of practical applications but, is SB research really based on engineering principles? Is it contributing to the artificial synthesis of life or using approaches "sophisticated" enough to fall outside the scope of biotechnology or metabolic engineering? We have reviewed the state of the art on synthetic biology and we conclude that most research projects actually describe an extension of metabolic engineering. We draw this conclusion because the complexity of living organisms, their tight dependence on evolution and our limited knowledge of the interactions between the molecules they are made of, actually make life difficult to engineer. We therefore propose the term synthetic biology should be used more sparingly.
合成生物学是一个独特的、具有革命性的领域，有着广泛的实际应用，但是，合成生物学研究真的基于工程学原理吗？它是有助于生命的人工合成，还是使用了足够“复杂”的方法，从而超出了生物技术或代谢工程的范畴？我们回顾了合成生物学的最新进展，得出的结论是，大多数研究项目实际上描述的是代谢工程的延伸。我们得出这一结论是因为生物体的复杂性、它们对进化的紧密依赖以及我们对构成生物体的分子之间相互作用的有限了解，实际上使得对生命进行工程化改造变得困难。因此，我们建议应更谨慎地使用“合成生物学”这个术语。
