Will Synthetic Biology Evolve into the Next Hot Field?

April 14, 2014

(Yahoo News) – Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us. As genetic engineering of the 1970s has evolved into synthetic biology today, the technologies and economics for sequencing (reading) and synthesizing (writing) DNA have become optimized for large-scale DNA processing. This allows synthetic biologists to design and modify the genetics of living systems so that they produce a wide variety of materials for us that don’t occur in nature, such as drugs, biofuels, flavors, fragrances and more.