Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology has been subject to numerous definitions; however, all of the available ones agree that synthetic biology is the study of applying the principles of engineering to biology for productive purposes: the use of synthetic biology tools to deliberately design and construct biological systems or their parts to serve a particular purpose. A key area in synthetic biology is the construction of living “production plants” for the manufacture of complex chemical compounds from simpler starting materials, other research areas include bioinformatics (using synthetic gene networks), synthetic genomics and genome minimisation as well as the biosafety and societal aspects of synthetic biology among others. [1]