Synthetic Biology Vs. Genetic Engineering.
With the rapid growth in the understanding of genetics in recent decades, different approaches to manipulate biology have arisen. Some of them serve a useful social purpose and others enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. Synthetic biology, one of the newest areas of research in biology, aims to engineer new biological systems in order to create organisms with novel human-valuable features. This term has many times been called “extreme genetic engineering” and there is still, in social and scientific media, confusion about the differences between genetic engineering and synthetic biology. The question arises if this problem is a matter of terminology or if there is a scientific difference between these two fields of biology. Even though DNA manipulation is the basis of these two practices, it is important to clarify that genetic engineering is the set of methodologies for altering the genetic material, while synthetic biology is a new field that uses genetic engineering, mathematical modeling, and industrial analysis among other tools in order to create new biological systems.
Genetic engineering is a relatively new and undefined term. For millennia, humans have genetically manipulated species of its interest, like cattle, wolves and boars. Although in most of human history this enhancement of organisms was not done in a lab and the molecular mechanisms were unknown, the essence and result are the same as in modern genetic engineering: improving features of a wild organism by modifying its genome. As the Encyclopædia Britannica explains in the definition of genetic engineering, what is referred to with this term has been getting narrower with time. Nowadays the scientific community refers to genetic engineering as efforts performed by recombinant DNA technologies and molecular cloning (Abdullah et al., 2014). With modern genetic engineering, it is possible to recombine, cut and paste genes from one organism into another target organism. For example, researchers led by Eric Poelscha at the Mayo Clinic engineered mutant domestic cat embryos by inserting the Green Fluorescent Protein isolated from jellyfish into the cat’s genome. This glowing feline was created in the need of a better model organism for the study of the cat’s HIV (Poeschla et al., 2011). This is how genetic engineering is a changing term that nowadays refers to direct lab manipulation of an organism’s genome to improve a specific feature.
Synthetic biology, on the other hand, is a much newer term that claims to be a new field within the biological sciences. Similar to genetic engineering, the definition of synthetic biology has also changed over time. The open group of synthetic biologists explains that, “The term synthetic biology was first used on genetically engineered bacteria that were created with recombinant DNA technology which was synonymous with bioengineering. Later the term synthetic biology was used as a mean to redesign life”(OpenWetWare, 2010). It seems that synthetic biology originated from genetic engineering but nowadays it implies the application of various scientific and intellectual areas. Synthetic biology aims to design and create full genetic systems that can be implemented in an organism in order to perform a self-regulated task. This does not imply just recombining DNA, but designing and modeling a novel pathway by assembling many different pieces of genetic material collected and characterized from natural organisms. For example, Chris Anderson from UC Berkeley has been working on the development of a bacterial system that would be capable of avoiding the immune system, sense tumor cells, and invade and self-destruct after a programed time (Singer, 2007). Also, synthetic biology pioneer, J. Craig Venter has developed an alga that is capable of producing biofuels from carbon dioxide in the environment, a double win (Biello, 2011). According to synthetic biologists, organisms like these would be considered new species, unlike the cat with a jellyfish gene, but a complete biological system that could not have evolved from nature and would even have to be classified in a separate domain of life.
The ultimate purpose of synthetic biology and genetic engineering is a key aspect for understanding how genetic engineering is one of the multiple fields essential for synthetic biology. As shown by the examples of Dr. Anderson and Venter, synthetic biology has direct social purposes, namely, to develop a novel therapy for treating cancer and a novel process to produce clean energy from air pollution, respectively. As a consequence many other fields have to be incorporated to synthetic biology. For example, mathematical modeling alongside experimental testing allows synthetic biologist to predict and analyze the behavior of their designed system (Chandran et al., 2009). Furthermore, implementation concerns have to be taken into account in order to analyze the potential environmental or health impacts in the usage of a synthetic organism, and even the industrialization and economical potential of the synthetic organism as a new product in the market must be considered. As we can see, genetic engineering is a useful tool for scientists, and is fundamental for synthetic biology but it does not necessarily imply a direct social impact like the later field does. Therefore, genetic engineering should be treated as a tool more than an engineering field like synthetic biology.
Moreover, synthetic biology has the intention to engineer[KA1] biology more than genetic engineering actually has. Throughout the course of history, engineering has organized systematically scientific concepts and methodologies in order to better implement scientific knowledge into daily life problems. Thus have chemistry and physics been incorporated in many engineering fields but biology has fallen behind. Synthetic biology is attacking this problem by developing individual DNA fragments called BioBricks that can be easily assembled as Lego-like pieces of a genetic circuit. This system has been well received; so much so that there is even an international synthetic biology, called iGEM, in which students from many universities around the world create a synthetic biology project and constantly produce new BioBricks (Knight et al., 2008). These pieces are publically managed by the different foundations, where they can be ordered and easily assembled in any research laboratory. On the other hand, the engineering in genetic engineering has been treated as a synonym of human manipulated genetics rather than the optimization of it. This shows how synthetic biology has truly engineered biology, improving, characterizing and systematizing the principles of life for creating biological machines that would serve a human purpose.
Through the course of biology, our understanding of genetics has increased tremendously and it was just a matter of time before human curiosity would try to play God by manipulating the principles of life. Beyond the man-made terminology for these two practices, the scientific community distinguishes genetic engineering as a set of methodologies for gene editing and synthetic biology as the approach to engineer and industrialize new biological systems. With the objectivity that characterizes science, it is also important to note that both synthetic biology and genetic engineering are part of the same approach humans use to put hands in the intrinsic complexity of molecular biology. In the end, as Drew Endy, synthetic biologist and former civil engineer, puts it, “Testing of understanding by building is the shortest path to demonstrating what you know and what you don’t” (Rawat, 2014).
Bibliography
· E. Poeschla et al. 2011. Antiviral Restriction Factor Transgenesis in the Domestic Cat. Nature Methods. Vol 8. №10.
· T. F. Knight, et al. 2008. Engineering BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts. Journal of Biological Engineering 2 (5): 1–12
· E. Singer. 2007. Creating Tumor-Killing Bacteria. Online MIT Technology Review.
· D. Biello. 2011. Can Algae Fee the World and Fuel the Planet? A Q&A with Craig Venter. Online Scientific American. November 15, 2011.
· Open Source. 2010. What is Synthetic Bioloy? http://syntheticbiology.org/FAQ.html. OpenWetWare.
· M. G. Abdullah, et al. 2014. Genetic Engineering. Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/228897/genetic-engineering
· D. Chandran et al. 2009. Mathematical Modeling and Synthetic Biology. Drug Discovery Today: Disease Models. Vol. 5. 299–309.
· S. S. Rawat. 2014. Best of Biotechnology in 2014. Online Dreamer Biologist. December 31, 2014.