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Decarbonising the world economy with synthetic biology
Macquarie University Distinguished Professor Ian Paulsen, discusses how synthetic biology can be used to decarbonise the global economy. Addressing atmospheric carbon from human activities is paramount to tackling climate change. Synthetic biology offers a likely way to accelerate this decarbonisation of the global economy while simultaneously building new industries and jobs. At the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology (CoESB), our researchers play a pivotal role in creating a pathway for this possible future.

Synthetic Biology (SB) is a revolutionary discipline with a vast range of practical applications, but is SB research really based on engineering principles? Does it contributing to the artificial synthesis of life or does it utilise approaches sufficiently advanced to fall outside the scope of biotechnology or metabolic engineering? This volume reviews the development of SB and includes the major milestones of the discipline, the 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' approaches towards the construction of an artificial cell and the development of the 'iGEM' competition. We conclude that SB is an emerging field with extraordinary technological potential, but that most research projects actually are an extension of metabolic engineering since the complexity of living organisms, their tight dependence on evolution and our limited knowledge of the interactions between the molecules, actually make life difficult to engineer.

Cover -- Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- 1 Synthetic Biology in Situ -- Coda 1 Towards Collaborative Practices -- 2 Barriers -- Coda 2 Brokering Relations -- 3 Bacteria -- Coda 3 Critics on the Inside -- 4 Bodies -- Coda 4 Reciprocal Reflexivity -- 5 Enacting Ontologies, Failure and Time -- Coda 5 Reflections on Collaboration -- References -- Index

This report provides the vision and direction for supporting a world-leading synthetic biology community in the UK. Produced by an independent panel of experts for the government's Department for Business Innovation and Skills, it sets out a shared vision for realising the potential of synthetic biology in the UK. The roadmap aims to deliver a synthetic biology sector that is cutting edge; economically vibrant, diverse and sustainable; and of clear public benefit. Recommendations in the roadmap also provide a compass-bearing for the synthetic biology community, helping to align interests towards future growth opportunities, whilst identifying the resources and support needed to accelerate progress in the shorter term.

How do synthetic biologists think about the risks in their research? This paper reports on a novel elicitation method that got surprising answers. Participants reflected not only on technical, but also on societal and psychological risks and responsibilities. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), a governance framework supported by many policy makers in the EU and UK, aims to help ensure that societal, as well as technical risks, are addressed at an early stage. However, defining what those risks are is a complex process. We found that when synthetic biologists were allowed to define 'risk' according to their own concerns, they more often chose to explore social and systemic risks to themselves, to science, and to the purposes and motivations of their own research. We argue that RRI as a science governance framework, and synthetic biology as a science, both need to take the wider concerns of scientists in the field as seriously as other potential impacts of emerging technology.

Yes ; Marrying synthetic biology with synthetic chemistry provides a powerful approach toward natural product diversification, combining the best of both worlds: expediency and synthetic capability of biogenic pathways and chemical diversity enabled by organic synthesis. Biosynthetic pathway engineering can be employed to insert a chemically orthogonal tag into a complex natural scaffold affording the possibility of site-selective modification without employing protecting group strategies. Here we show that, by installing a sufficiently reactive handle (e.g., a C–Br bond) and developing compatible mild aqueous chemistries, synchronous biosynthesis of the tagged metabolite and its subsequent chemical modification in living culture can be achieved. This approach can potentially enable many new applications: for example, assay of directed evolution of enzymes catalyzing halo-metabolite biosynthesis in living cells or generating and following the fate of tagged metabolites and biomolecules in living systems. We report synthetic biological access to new-to-nature bromo-metabolites and the concomitant biorthogonal cross-coupling of halo-metabolites in living cultures. ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013/ERC consolidator grant GCGXC grant agreement no 614779) and ERAIB (Grant no. 031A338A) and H2020-MSCA-IF-2014 Grant no. 659399

Synthetic biology is a dynamic, young, ambitious, attractive, and heterogeneous scientific discipline. It is constantly developing and changing, which makes societal evaluation of this emerging new science a challenging task, prone to misunderstandings. Synthetic biology is difficult to capture, and confusion arises not only regarding which part of synthetic biology the discussion is about, but also with respect to the underlying concepts in use. This book offers a useful toolbox to approach this complex and fragmented field. It provides a biological access to the discussion using a 'layer' model that describes the connectivity of synthetic or semisynthetic organisms and cells to the realm of natural organisms derived by evolution. Instead of directly reviewing the field as a whole, firstly our book addresses the characteristic features of synthetic biology that are relevant to the societal discussion. Some of these features apply only to parts of synthetic biology, whereas others are relevant to synthetic biology as a whole. In the next step, these new features are evaluated with respect to the different areas of synthetic biology. Do we have the right words and categories to talk about these new features? In the third step, traditional concepts like "life" and "artificiality" are scrutinized with regard to their discriminatory power. This approach may help to differentiate the discussion on synthetic biology. Lastly our refined view is utilized for societal evaluation. We have investigated the public views and attitudes to synthetic biology. It also includes the analysis of ethical, risk and legal questions, posed by present and future practices of synthetic biology. This book contains the results of an interdisciplinary research project and presents the authors' main findings and recommendations. They are addressed to science, industry, politics and the general public interested in this upcoming field of biotechnology