Taming the Beast of Biology: Synthetic Biology and Biological Systems Engineering

Abstract

Despite the availability of a variety of ' -omics ' technologies to support the system-wide analysis of industrially relevant microorganisms, the manipulation of strains towards an economically relevant goal remains a challenge. Remarkably, our ability to catalogue the participants in and model ever more comprehensive aspects of a microorganism's physiology is now complemented by technologies that permanently expand the scope of engineering interventions that can be imagined. In fact, genome-wide editing and re-synthesis of microbial and even eukaryotic chromosomes have become widely applied methods. At the heart of this emerging system-wide engineering approach, often labelled ' Synthetic Biology ' , is the continuous improvement of large-scale DNA synthesis, which is put to two-fold use: (i) starting ever more ambitious efforts to re-write existing and coding novel molecular systems, and (ii) designing and constructing increasingly sophisticated library technologies, which has led to a renaissance of directed evolution in strain engineering. Here, we briefly review some of the critical concepts and technological stepping-stones of Synthetic Biology on its way to becoming a mature industrial technology.

In vivo, in vitro and in silico: an open space for the development of microbe‐based applications of synthetic biology

“…Industrial applications go hand in hand with understanding the puzzles of their environmental niches and metabolism. We can anticipate that, using these same organisms, metabolic engineering will continue to evolve over the next few decades, now benefiting from rapid advances in synthetic biology (SynBio), with a likely emphasis on the use of large-scale DNA synthesis (Panke, 2020). This topic has been the subject of many studies [see, e.g.…”