This was an amazing week for synthetic biology community, part of the reason is the synthetic biology has completed 10 years since the very first synthetically engineered biological oscillator and toggle switch were introduced in journal Nature in year 2000. So on this eve I have decided that the title of this blog post “This week in synthetic biology” is going to be a regular section of Fisheye Perspective blog appearing on every weekend. Initially I will be posting a link round up for a week which will include excerpts from peer reviewed articles, news items and interesting tweets. But I have few interesting future plans including a podcast series TWISB (covering both Systems and Synthetic Biology) in close association of fellow synthetic and systems biology bloggers. If you have a synthetic biology story which you want to share you can send an email to post@syntheticfuture.posterous.com.

Ten years of synergy
The latest issues of Nature has an editorial on last ten years of synthetic biology.

As it develops along this and other paths, synthetic biology itself will demand more by way of new fundamental biological knowledge — quantitative, systematic, computational and biophysical. And conversely, one of the deepest lessons from these first ten years is that biological knowledge will require synthetic approaches if it is to become a mature and reasonably predictive science.

Quorum of bacteria genetic clocks
I already wrote a short post about this, as such article already got superb response in all type of media circles. For interested readers I will suggest these two articles (available free to read) and this video which explains everything about the work of Jeff Hasty and colleagues. One thing which is mostly overlooked in the hype is the the role of micurofludics devices, in this case microfluidic devices were used to investigate the collective synchronization properties along with spatiotemporal waves occurring at millimetre scales. In Hasty’s system,

the bacteria are lodged on a microfluidic device that contains tiny channels to allow nutrients to flow to the cells and waste products to flow away. The team reports that the timing and strength of the synchronized clock’s oscillations depend on how quickly nutrients and waste are pumped through the channels of the device.

Five hard truths for synthetic biology and bioengineering
Again I blogged this one here, Roberta Kwok explores five challenges for the synthetic biology and how they might be resolved. I would add two more challenges in this list: a missing systems level understanding and lack of technology to tackle the large assembly problem for DNA synthesis.

Synthetic biology drives the design of strong and optimized promoters
Researchers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute have developed a synthetic biology approach for the designe and optimization of promoters. These synthetic promoters could help to improve the transcription levels in cellular contexts in which current promoter don’t work very well or have little or no expression in many cell lineages. Stephen J. Elledge and colleagues have implemented this approach for the generation and screening of transcription factor binding sites in human cells.

Using an unbiased screen of a synthetic 10-bp repeat sequence library we identified many synthetic enhancer elements capable of increasing transcription from a minimal CMV promoter. In several cases, the recovered synthetic enhancers had transcriptional activation activity on par with the WT CMV enhancer with only two rounds of enrichment. Thus a 100-bp synthetic enhancer can be engineered to match or exceed the promoter strength of the strongest known mammalian promoters.

A NSF Funded Bio-fabrication Project
This week a new International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB) production facility was lunched which will be producing free standardized DNA parts and methods. Facility will be lead by bioengineers from UC Berkeley and Stanford University and it has already secured two years of funding from National Science Foundation (NSF). Project has already secured commitments from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). A following news release says

Today, a single designer microbe can take years to create and cost tens of millions of dollars, since each control element – a promoter or transcription factor – has to be identified, characterized and tweaked in order to be reused. One UC Berkeley project to engineer microbes to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin took 10 years to get out of the lab into small-scale production, at a cost of $25 million.

Thats all for this week.
BONUS: A bit old article on the challenges of informatics in synthetic biology.