Review: The second decade of synthetic biology: 2010–2020 (Nature Comms.)

I guess if this were a normal year, we’d be spending time looking back over the past decade, but Covid-19 has made anything pre-2019 seem like a different lifetime. Still, here’s a retrospective you don’t want to miss. Meng and Ellis take us on a short walk down memory lane through the “second decade” of synthetic biology – and what a decade it’s been. I won’t give away too much here, because you should read this yourself, but we’ve come a long way since 2010. (The authors crowdsourced some of these ideas on Twitter, and acknowledge these conversations https://twitter.com/ProfTomEllis/status/1280982288797446144 – it’s interesting to ponder how Twitter might have contributed to SynBio over the past decade). What’s even more exciting is that later this year there will be a companion “look ahead” to 2030. I wonder where SynBio will take us by 2030? (Summary by Mary Williams @PlantTeaching) Nature Comms. 10.1038/s41467-020-19092-2