Tag: Synthetic Biology

The excellent review by Moses et al. starts by defining the oft-confused terms  metabolite engineering and systems biology. Although systems biology can contribute to the former, it is distinguished by the use of “defined ‘parts’ that are easily combined and exchanged, using standardized workflows…

As photosynthetic autotrophs, plants have the potential to convert sunlight into a vast array of useful products: to act as little green metabolic factories. Of course, they already provide us with everything from carbohydrates and vitamins to stimulants and medicinal compounds, but with a few small…

A healthy human diet should include phytonutrients such as carotenoids. Several approaches including classical breeding and transgenic plant production have been used to increase carotenoid abundance in plant tissues; challenges to these approaches include feedback controls, cell toxicity due to abnormally…

Marchantia polymorpha (a liverwort) is a living relative of the earliest terrestrial plants. As it has a simple genome and morphology and is readily transformable, it provides a good platform for synthetic biology (see https://www.openplant.org/marchantia/). Delmans et al. have designed an “engineering-oriented”…

Filmed for iBiology 2016 Talk Overview Dr. Jay Keasling discusses the promise of biological systems to create carbon-neutral products for a range of applications, including fuels, chemicals and drugs. Keasling discusses the application of these principles to the development of a microbial platform…

Our way of life depends on the chemical manufacture of thousands of products. Some of these can be produced through biomanufacturing, which may involve starting with a biological starting material, or using an enzyme or organism as catalyst. Advances in synthetic biology, metabolic engineering and genomics…

The gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas, which introduces double-strand breaks that are repaired by non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), is best known for the promise it holds in modifying an organism’s DNA without the introduction of exogenous genes. However, as Puchta describes (Curr. Opin. Plant Biol.…

Svitashev et al. demonstrate a new way to introduce CRISPR-Cas9 reagents into a plant cell, through the biolistic delivery of pre-assembled Cas9-gRNA ribonucleoproteins. This approach was successful in the production of engineered plants, and also demonstrated that this method can be done in a DNA- and…