Boston University Biomedical Engineer Ahmad Khalil led the research team that engineered a new method for developing the genetic components synthetic biologist use to build networks. Credit: Boston University
Through the assembly of genetic components into “circuits” that perform logical operations in living cells, synthetic biologists aim to artificially empower cells to solve critical problems in medicine, energy and the environment. To succeed, however, they’ll need far more reliable genetic components than the small number of “off-the-shelf” bacterial parts now available.
Now a new method developed by Boston University biomedical engineers Ahmad S. Khalil and James J. Collins — and collaborators at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT — could significantly increase the number of genetic components in synthetic biologists’ toolkit and, as a result, the size and complexity of the genetic circuits they can build. The development could dramatically enhance their efforts not only to understand how biological organisms behave and develop, but also to reprogram them for a variety of practical applications.
Described in the August 2 online edition of Cell, the method offers a new paradigm for constructing and analyzing genetic circuits in eukaryotes — or organisms whose cells contain nuclei, which include everything from yeasts to humans. Instead of constructing these circuits with off-the-shelf parts from bacteria and porting them into eukaryotes, as most synthetic biologists do, Khalil and his collaborators have engineered these circuits using modular, functional parts from the eukaryotes themselves. Via Researchers expand synthetic biology’s toolkit: New method could enable reprogramming of mammalian cells.
