Engineering biology is an area of bioengineering that combines the methods of high-level design and implementation of artificial organisms or their components, including those that did not previously exist in nature.
Content
History
Ideas for creating living objects with desired properties have long been at the level of theoretical developments, which were mostly philosophical in nature. One of the first works on the application of the scientific method to the then available data on the physics of living was the work of Erwin Schrödinger “What is life from the point of view of physics?” (1946) [1] .
The U.S. Department of Defense has funded synthetic biology work since the early 2000s, focusing on approaches for assembling DNA from genetically engineered organisms from standard components. In 2002, the first catalog of such elements was formed - DARPA BioComp [2] , which consisted of about 300 standard genetic elements: promoters , binding sites, terminators, and fluorescence genes that bioengineers used in their work. Using such bioblocks, researchers with even little experience could quickly design and synthesize DNA regions to develop, for example, living bacteria-detectors that began to fluoresce in response to the appearance of a dangerous chemical compound.
During the first decade of the 21st century, the development of synthetic biology was decisively influenced by the social and professional activities of Professor Andrew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, Dr. Andy organized a special subgroup on synthetic biology as part of the Jason's advisory research team at the US Department of Defense . In order to captivate the Ministry of Defense with ideas of independence from oil and gas sources of raw materials, cheaper production of strategic materials, and the creation of new detectors, his subgroup issued several reports on the prospects of using applied bioengineering in the interests of national defense and security. In 2004, he will begin large-scale testing of approaches to designing biological functions from standard bioblocks by organizing the annual International Competitions in Synthetic Biology IGEM on the basis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Advising DARPA on synthetic biology projects, Professor Andy is developing the concept of state-of-the-art biological techniques for designing programmed living machines. The results of their research were summarized in the work “Foundations for engineering biology” (2005), published in the journal Nature [3] . The article was put into circulation and a new term was discovered at that time - engineering biology .
At the same time, the American engineer and biologist Craig Venter in 2010 created the first cell with an artificial genome. The Synthia project on the synthesis of a bacterial genome with a length of about 580 thousand base pairs, at that time cost more than $ 40 million. This demonstrated the implementation of synthetic biology approaches for de novo synthesis of the whole genome of a living organism.
In 2015, US Senate member Johnson Eddie Bernice introduced a draft bill on industry advanced development [4] , which involves coordination of activities in the field of engineering biology by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Agency environmental protection, and other federal departments.
Tools and Techniques
One of the first methodologies for integrating various methods for the high-level description of biological systems and methods for their implementation in a living cell was the TASBE platform, developed by specialists of Raytheon BBN Technologies , MIT and Boston University [5] . Within the framework of the platform, various software samples for the automated design of functional living systems were combined [6]
Implementation Examples
Biology and Medicine
- Molecular surgery
- Synthetic morphogenesis [7]
Energy
- Living Solar Battery [8]
See also
- Bioinformatics
- Genetic Engineering
- Programmable matter
- Self-organization
- Synthetic biology
- CRISPR
Notes
- ↑ Schrodinger, E. (1946). What is life ?: the physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge
- ↑ Knight T. DARPA BioComp plasmid distribution 1.00 of standard biobrick components. - MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2002. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/21167
- ↑ Endy, D. (2005). Foundations for engineering biology. Nature, 438 (7067), 449-453. doi: 10.1038 / nature04342
- ↑ HR591. - Engineering Biology Research and Development Act of 2015. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/591
- ↑ Beal, J., Weiss, R., Densmore, D., Adler, A., Babb, J., Bhatia, S., ... & Loyall, J. (2011, June). TASBE: A tool-chain to accelerate synthetic biological engineering. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (pp. 19-21). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.7189&rep=rep1&type=pdf
- ↑ Alekhine M. D. Synthetic biology software for computer-aided design of functional living systems. M .: MIPT, 2012. https://www.slideshare.net/defensenetwork/ss-13438005
- ↑ Teague, BP, Guye, P., & Weiss, R. (2016). Synthetic Morphogenesis. Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology, 8 (9), a023929. doi: 10.1101 / cshperspect.a023929
- ↑ Schuergers, N., Werlang, C., Ajo-Franklin, C., & Boghossian, A. (2017). A Synthetic Biology Approach to Engineering Living Photovoltaics. Energy & Environmental Science. doi: 10.1039 / C7EE00282C
Literature
- Klabukov I.D. Collection of problems in engineering biology. M., 2016. Doi: 10.2139 / ssrn.2898429
- Kelley, NJ (2015). Engineering Biology for Science & Industry: Accelerating Progress. http://nancyjkelley.com/wp-content/uploads/Meeting-Summary.Final_.6.9.15-Formatted.pdf
- Kelley, NJ (2014). The promise and challenge of engineering biology in the United States. Industrial Biotechnology , 10 (3), 137-139. doi: 10.1089 / ind.2014.1516
- E. Schrödinger. What is life in terms of physics? / Per. from English A.A. Malinovsky. —— M.: RIMIS, 2009 —— 176 p., Ill. ISBN 978-5-9650-0057-9.