Synthetic Biology and Tissue Engineering

Systems and Synthetic Biology

Systems and Synthetic Biology 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.