US Department of Agriculture, National Wildlife Research Center, 4101 LaPorte Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80521, USA.
Wildlife Ecology and Management, University of Freiburg, 79106 Freiburg, Germany.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2017 Feb;32(2):97-107. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2016.10.016. Epub 2016 Nov 19.
Evidence indicates that, despite some critical successes, current conservation approaches are not slowing the overall rate of biodiversity loss. The field of synthetic biology, which is capable of altering natural genomes with extremely precise editing, might offer the potential to resolve some intractable conservation problems (e.g., invasive species or pathogens). However, it is our opinion that there has been insufficient engagement by the conservation community with practitioners of synthetic biology. We contend that rapid, large-scale engagement of these two communities is urgently needed to avoid unintended and deleterious ecological consequences. To this point we describe case studies where synthetic biology is currently being applied to conservation, and we highlight the benefits to conservation biologists from engaging with this emerging technology.
有证据表明，尽管在某些关键方面取得了成功，但当前的保护方法并没有减缓生物多样性丧失的总体速度。合成生物学领域能够极其精确地编辑自然基因组，可能为解决一些棘手的保护问题（如入侵物种或病原体）提供了潜在的解决方案。然而，我们认为保护界与合成生物学家的接触还不够。我们认为，迫切需要这两个社区迅速大规模地参与进来，以避免产生意外和有害的生态后果。为此，我们描述了目前正在将合成生物学应用于保护的案例研究，并强调了保护生物学家与这项新兴技术接触的好处。
