Designing DNA: synthetic biology enters the spotlight

Filed in archive Biotech on January 20, 2006

Scientists are increasingly using living things as the building blocks for new materials. I've described several of theses lately (here and New York Times article this week. The article explains how researchers are designing DNA and bacteria to create microbes that produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells, genes to produce malaria drugs, and biological circuitry to detect cancer cells and deliver so-called suicide genes causing them to self-destruct.

Some call what they"re doing genetic engineering; others prefer the term synthetic biology. "We"re taking about taking biology and building it for a specific purpose, rather than taking existing biology and adapting it," says Professor Jay D. Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley. "We don"t have to rely on what nature"s necessarily created."

Like Keasling, researchers at MIT are looking to build on nature"s capabilities with their
BioBricks, strings of DNA that can perform various functions or be strung together to make more complex devices. Designing with BioBricks, they say, is like writing software, but with DNA sequences as the code. They have used them to create biological film, and even published photos of the research team on the resulting green slime (see NYT image above, and similar research Codon Devices, a firm specializing in synthesizing long strands of DNA, off the ground.

These new biological building blocks have a host of potentially beneficial applications. But along with the potential benefits come concerns about the abuse of the technology. What, for instance, is to stop someone from developing new, highly resistant viruses? Viruses for polio and the 1918 pandemic flu virus have in fact already been synthesized. And then there are the ethical implications of designing living things and using living things as tools and materials for our own self-serving purposes. It seems the smaller we go, the bigger the possibilities, and the bigger the questions.