What is Synthetic Biology?
Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to biological systems, with the aim of producing organisms with novel, predictable, useful behaviour. Synthetic biologists try to make the elements messy biological systems as modular, hierarchical and standardised as the nuts and bolts used by engineers, so that they can be combined and recombined in multiple ways, with predictable behaviour. We believe that computational approaches to the design and simulation of genetic circuits will be as crucial to synthetic biology as CAD systems have become to electrical engineering.
At Newcastle University researchers and students from a range of disciplines, including Computing Science, Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Genetics and Engineering are involved in active research into synthetic biology.
Our Research
Our research focuses on the use of the Gram positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis as a chassis. B. subtilis is a common, harmless bacterium which normally lives on soils. It has been widely used in the biotechnology industries because it is non-pathogenic, secretes proteins into its environment, and forms hardy spores when times get tough. It is therefore well-studied, and relatively easy to work with.
Current projects include:
- MoSeC: an automated Model to DNA conversion application
- BacilloBricks: a repository of information about Bacillus BioBricks
- SubtilNet: integrated functional network analysis of B. subtilis and eleven of its relatives
- Continued development of techniques for thes to the application of computational intelligence techniques to the design of genetic circuits