Synthetic biology is the engineering discipline that applies design principles drawn from electrical and mechanical engineering — modularity, standardisation, abstraction — to biological systems. The core practice is design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycling: a genetic circuit or metabolic pathway is designed in silico (using parts registries, pathway models), built via DNA Synthesis (Twist, Ansa, Telesis) or CRISPR-mediated genome editing (CRISPR / Gene Editing), expressed in a chassis organism or Cell-Free Systems platform, and characterised by sequencing and metabolomics before the next cycle.
The enabling layer is cheap, rapid DNA synthesis (cost per base pair has fallen ~10⁶× since 2000) combined with increasingly predictive metabolic models. Applications span: industrial biomanufacturing (fermentation-derived chemicals, fuels, materials — including Biomaterials precursors such as PHA, spider silk, lycopene); therapeutic biologics (engineered cell therapies, oncolytic viruses, protein drugs); biosensors (engineered organisms for environmental detection); and food tech (precision fermentation for alternative proteins).
The production substrate for the KB company Synbio Technologies is DNA synthesis services enabling third-party synbio programmes. Closely related concepts: DNA Synthesis (Twist, Ansa, Telesis), Cell-Free Systems, CRISPR / Gene Editing, and the output-material concepts Biomaterials and Biomaterials.
Frontier
- At what cost per base pair does DNA synthesis become cheap enough for whole-genome synthesis of industrial chassis organisms to be economically routine?
- Can cell-free expression systems achieve batch yields competitive with in-vivo fermentation for therapeutic proteins?
- Which chassis organism (E. coli, yeast, CHO, cyanobacteria) wins for most product classes in a low-cost bio-foundry model?