Biotechnology

Systems and Synthetic Biotechnology

Systems and Synthetic Biotechnology is a relatively new field in biomedical research. It focuses on engineering new or modified signaling proteins to create desired signaling pathways in the cell. Every living cell is an extremely complex machine expressing thousands of different proteins. Due to superb regulation, many cells, such as photoreceptors and other neurons in vertebrates, can live for decades. Cells can also self-reproduce by division, where both daughter cells are perfectly viable. Natural selection (the “blind watchmaker”, to use Dawkins’ expression) spent hundreds of millions of year to achieve this perfection. Due to elucidation of the intricacies of cellular regulatory mechanisms we can now play evolution on our time scale: re-design proteins and signaling pathways to achieve our ends.Systems and Synthetic Biology is a novel field that finds its origin at the intersection of biology and engineering. It involves designing and construction of biological systems or devices that can be applied in varied domains to get specified results. It’s a multidisciplinary effort made by scientists to understand the functioning of biological organisms, cells & genes and implementation of artificial genetic processes to give specific characteristics to an organism. It can even be used to develop a completely new biological system.