Synthetic biology: applying engineering to life sciences to develop rationally designed biological parts, devices and systems

Synthetic biology (SB) has attracted considerable attention in recent years.The term "SB" can be traced back to 1912 to Stéphane Leduc's book La Biologie Synthétique.The next direct reference to the term is found in 1974 when Waclaw Szybalski, in only a few sentences, laid the foundations for the emerging field of SB.The new wave of SB aims to design and engineer biologically based parts, novel devices, and networks as well as redesigning existing, natural biological pathways.Hence, SB has the potential to deliver significant technological benefits and economic growth.Synthetic biology has already made a resounding impact in fundamental and applied research.Currently it has broad applications in a number of areas including medicine, the environment and energy, agriculture, and food industries.Selected milestones and significant achievements include the reconstruction of a complete microbial genome (Gibson et al., 2010), the synthesis of a yeast chromosome (Dymond et al., 2011), and most recently, the engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce high levels of a key precursor of the antimalarial drug artemisinin (Paddon et al., 2013).Synthetic Biology: Tools and Applications, edited by Huimin Zhao (University of Illinois) provides a comprehensive coverage and a succinct overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on SB (Zhao, 2013).The overall scope of the book is based Synthetic biology: applying engineering to life sciences to develop rationally designed biological parts, devices, and systems

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