The amazing Synthetic Biology!

What words come to your mind when you hear: “Synthetic biology”? Some of you will recall fluorescent kitties encountered in the web. A few people will mention cheap insulin production. But the majority would probably say: “what is that?”

We think that it is unfair that such an important field of biology is almost completely unknown to general public. Synthetic biology uses the capabilities of living cells to produce extremely complex molecules which cannot be synthesized by means of industrial chemistry. Currently, it provides us with novel drugs, diagnostic tools and materials with numerous other functions.

In this article we will discuss two examples of synthetic biology application: One will show you how synthetic biology made antibodies the main diagnostic tool for infectious diseases. And the other one will give you a hint about the usage of living cells for data storage.

Antibodies are one of the key tools in medical diagnostics. These proteins are produced by the immune system in order to detect and destroy pathogens. As antibodies are very specific in binding pathogens, they can be used to identify which virus or bacterium causes the disease. In the past the only way to obtain antibodies was to extract them from living organisms. An animal was injected with a pathogen. As the disease progressed, the immune system produced antibodies to fight infection. Then the antibodies were extracted from the animal’s blood and could be used to detect the pathogen in human blood samples. This method of production made antibodies a very expensive diagnostic tool. We had to waste a healthy animal to collect a single dose of antibodies. Synthetic biology made a revolution in antibodies production making them cheaper and more accurate in diagnosing. It enabled us to isolate immune B cells from a pathogen injected animal. Then we can force the B cells to proliferate and produce antibodies continuously. Thus, we obtained a permanent source of antibodies. As a result of this breakthrough, the cost of antibodies was reduced significantly. Now they are used not only to recognize pathogens, but to detect other substances as well. For example, antibodies are used to determine hormones levels in pregnancy tests.

Bacterial DNA as data storage device

Nowadays there is a trend to decrease the size of data storage devices, making them cheaper, lighter and easier to carry. However, can you think about a storage device as small as, let’s say, 3 micrometers? It is 6 times smaller than the thinnest human hair width. Synthetic biology allows us to use such a small thing as a bacterium for data storage. Considering, the increasing frequency of hack attacks, bacteria proved to be a useful device for data protection. Synthetic biologists use the genetic code, the language used by nature to store information, for data encryption. This technology has several advantages over conventional encryption tools. First of all, you should have a very specific equipment to retrieve the data from a bacterium. In addition, a bacterium can be forced to reshuffle the blocks of data in a random manner. Thus, each bacterium in your petri dish will have a unique data blocks assortment. As a result your data will be stored in millions different combinations. On top of that bacteria are cheap to grow and maintain for long time periods. Although at this point bacteria can store only a limited amount of data, this technology has a great potential for growth and improvement.