Focus Issue Editorial: Synthetic Biology

Abstract

Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a conceptual and operational revolution (Church et al., 2014) that's coming soon to a branch of plant science near you, if it's not there already (Liu and Stewart, 2015). The Synthetic Biology Focus Issue sets out to spread this disruptive news. SynBio is a transformative combination of DNA technology, engineering principles, and computational tools that makes it possible to design new life processes and to repurpose existing natural ones for useful purposes (Purnick and Weiss, 2009). SynBio will profoundly impact and empower how plant science is done and how plant science is used to sustainably solve global problems. SynBio is already creating new jobs and is likely to keep doing this for decades (Delebecque and Philp, 2015). SynBio is powerful for conceptual and operational reasons. The enormous conceptual power of SynBio is to open access to the vast "design space" that plants, and nature in general, have not explored (Bhatia et al., 2017). By discovering and deploying useful design space that evolution has "missed," SynBio enables plants: to make familiar compounds by new pathways, and make new-to-nature compounds; to supply genes needed to make high-value compounds in microorganisms; to manipulate familiar morphological structures, and build totally new-to-nature ones; to respond in new ways to old stimuli, and sense and respond to totally new stimuli; and to be managed based on weather forecasts and other predictions that plants cannot make themselves. The transformative operational power of SynBio lies in its drive to industrialize biology: that is, to replace highskill, slow, and costly artisanal work such as cloning and custom assays with computationally guided, automated, and standardized engineering procedures (Cameron et al., 2014; Chao et al., 2017). Although the industrialscale engineering potential of SynBio is far from fully realized at this point (Davies, 2019), it is very much here to stay and has begun to dictate major changes in biology education and training (National Research Council, 2015). Whether you are a trainee or a trainer, these trends are seriously worth considering for your future career's sake. A hallmark of SynBio is to rethink biological molecules, genes and proteins, as engineering "parts" that can be standardized, quantitatively characterized, and used to build a range of devices, much as standard resistors and capacitors are used as components in countless different electrical circuits (de Lorenzo and Schmidt, 2018). In the case of metabolic pathways, for instance, enzyme parts from plants or other organisms can be used as is and combined in novel ways to build

A pilot oral history of plant synthetic biology

“…For surveys of current activities and frontiers in plant SynBio, we refer readers to special journal issues (e.g. Benning and Sweetlove 2016 ; Stewart et al 2018 ; Hanson et al 2019 ; Kumar and Van de Peer 2020 ; Patron and Burgess 2023 ; Yang and Reyna-Llorens 2023 ), and to the reviews in Supplemental Table S1 .…”

“…Synthetic biology (SynBio) has been defined in various ways, of which these 2 are typical: “[SynBio] aims to build new properties into living systems so that they do or make something useful” ( Davies 2019 ); and “SynBio is a transformative combination of DNA technology, engineering principles, and computational tools that makes it possible to design new life processes and to repurpose existing natural ones for useful purposes” ( Hanson et al 2019 ). These and most other definitions stress that SynBio designs, builds, and uses biological components (“parts”) that do not exist in nature, and that the end goal is utility, i.e.…”