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F O C U S O N S Y N T H E T I C B I O LO G Y
PERSPECTIVES
T I M E L I N E
A brief history of synthetic biology
D. Ewen Cameron, Caleb J. Bashor and James J. Collins
Abstract | The ability to rationally engineer microorganisms has been a long-envisioned goal dating back more than a half-century. With the genomics revolution and rise of systems biology in the 1990s came the development of a rigorous engineering discipline to create, control and programme cellular behaviour. The resulting field, known as synthetic biology, has undergone dramatic growth throughout the past decade and is poised to transform biotechnology and medicine. This Timeline article charts the technological and cultural lifetime of synthetic biology, with an emphasis on key breakthroughs and future challenges.
The founding of the field of synthetic biology near the turn of the millennium was based on the transformational assertion that engineering approaches then mostly foreign to cell and molecular biology could be used both to study cellular systems and to facilitate their manipulation to productive ends. Now more than a decade old, synthetic biology has undergone considerable growth in scope, expectation and output, and has become a widely recognized branch of biological research1. In many aspects, the trajectory of the field during its first decade of existence has been non-linear, with periods of meaningful progress matched by episodes of inertia as design efforts have been forced to re-orient when confronted with the complexity and unpredictability of engineering inside living cells.
Although a consensus has yet to be reached on a precise definition of synthetic biology, the use of molecular biology tools and techniques to forward-engineer cellular behaviour has emerged as a broad identity for thefield, and a set of common engineering approaches and laboratory practices have developed, along with a vibrant community culture. Much of the foundational work in the field was carried out in the model microbial species Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and these microbial systems remain central in several focal areas of the field, including complex circuit design, metabolic engineering, minimal genome construction and cell-based therapeutic
strategies. In this Timeline article, we focus on efforts in synthetic biology that deal with microbial systems;...