A microfluidic technique uses a continuous fluid stream to generate monodisperse unilamellar phospholipid vesicles from a single bilayer (see picture). Since the vesicles are robust and efficiently encapsulate high concentrations of various molecules, they are useful as delivery vehicles and as model cellular systems.
synthetic biologists keep getting lucky, then maybe — just maybe — they will be able to engineer life “on the scale of building a mouse, like the whole thing,
A 2009 review1 showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out.
Creating life from scratch took a leap forward in 2009. Scientists led by Harvard's George Church unveiled a synthetic ribosome, the machinery inside cells that translates genes into proteins that build tissues and organs. Scientists hope to create cells, the building blocks of life, from scratch by cobbling together such cellular machinery, part of a burgeoning field of "synthetic" biology.
The protocell includes two or more RNA replicases which are able to make copies of each other. Concurrent with RNA replication, the vesicle membrane grows through the addition of fatty acids from micelle collisions. This causes the surface area of the protocell to increase while the volume remains constant, resulting in the elongation and increased instability of the protocell membrane. The membrane eventually divides, forming two daughter protocells, with the RNA replicases randomly divided between them.
Synthetic biology is a more organized and structured offshoot within the field of genetic engineering.
An alternative to creating novel organisms through the traditional “top-down” approach to synthetic biology involves creating them from the “bottom up” by assembling them from non-living components; the products of this approach are called “protocells".
Most of the best-known work in synthetic biology is “top down” in the sense that it starts with some pre-existing natural living system and then re-engineers it for some desired purpose , perhaps by synthesizing entire genomes. Another approach to engineering novel biological systems works strictly from the “bottom up” in the sense that it attempts to make new simple kinds of minimal chemical cellular life, using as raw ingredients only materials that were never alive.1 These bottom-up creations are often called “protocells” , as we explain below. In the long run, bottom-up and top-down synthetic biology will increasingly blend and become harder to distinguish.2 In the meantime, though, it is important to separate them, not least because their social and ethical profiles differ. The ethical, social, and regulatory challenges raised by top-down synthetic biology have received considerable attention over the past decade. Bottom-up synthetic biology has only just begun to receive similar scrutiny.
