Supramaniam Pashiini, Ces Oscar, Salehi-Reyhani Ali
Department of Chemistry, White City Campus, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK.
FabriCELL, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK.
Micromachines (Basel). 2019 Apr 30;10(5):299. doi: 10.3390/mi10050299.
Synthetic biology is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary branch of science that exploits the advancement of molecular and cellular biology. Conventional modification of pre-existing cells is referred to as the top-down approach. Bottom-up synthetic biology is an emerging complementary branch that seeks to construct artificial cells from natural or synthetic components. One of the aims in bottom-up synthetic biology is to construct or mimic the complex pathways present in living cells. The recent, and rapidly growing, application of microfluidics in the field is driven by the central tenet of the bottom-up approach-the pursuit of controllably generating artificial cells with precisely defined parameters, in terms of molecular and geometrical composition. In this review we survey conventional methods of artificial cell synthesis and their limitations. We proceed to show how microfluidic approaches have been pivotal in overcoming these limitations and ushering in a new generation of complexity that may be imbued in artificial cells and the milieu of applications that result.
合成生物学是一个迅速发展的多学科科学分支，它利用了分子和细胞生物学的进展。对现有细胞进行传统修饰被称为自上而下的方法。自下而上的合成生物学是一个新兴的互补分支，旨在从天然或合成成分构建人工细胞。自下而上合成生物学的目标之一是构建或模拟活细胞中存在的复杂途径。微流体技术在该领域最近迅速增长的应用是由自下而上方法的核心原则驱动的，即在分子和几何组成方面追求可控地生成具有精确定义参数的人工细胞。在这篇综述中，我们调查了人工细胞合成的传统方法及其局限性。我们接着展示微流体方法如何在克服这些局限性以及引入可能赋予人工细胞的新一代复杂性和由此产生的应用环境方面发挥了关键作用。
