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From 2009.igem.org

In our suvey we ask for the definition of Synthetic Biology. We received a lot of answers. If you want to read all definitions, click here please.

We have chosen the most original definitions:

• Engineering + Cell Biology - World Domination

• Inspired by Nature created by Human to develop new biological features and to unveil non yet understood biological/molecular pathway behaviour.

• It's considering life sciences from the point of view of an engineer, doing great GMOs using MB and CB tools. It's also thinking about what all this means as regards the special position of humans among terrestrian creatures.

• 1) The development of new life from the bottom up. 2) The systematization and re-arrangement of life as we know it today to have new functions, making it engineerable.

• Thinking like a engineer and doing like a molecular biology.

• Application of engineering principles (modularity, abstraction) to rationalize the art of genetic modification, increasing the complexity of systems that can be designed and constructed reliably.

• The possibility to engineer genetic systems out of simple genetic parts : It's a kind of 'genetic programation'

• Synthetic Biology is Systems biology in reverse - obtaining in vivo results by in silico prediction

• A ground up approach to genetic engineering in which parts encoding primitive biological functions are combined in model organisms to elicit new and useful biological behavior.

• A new interdisciplinary field, that involves the design, construction and standardization of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

• The intersection of biology and engineering.

• Synthetic biology is the powerful interface between biology, engineering, and computer science. It has great potential for the development, creation, and thorough understanding of novel biological systems.

• Just like computer programming, syn bio is aim at constructing biological system with standardized modules

• Synthetic Biology is where the biology involved is being created by non natural means.

• Creating macro-scale biological machines from micro-scale biomolecular components.

• Synthetic biology is a field which tries to look at the complex biological network by exploring every layer of the biological complexity. Therefore synthetic biology provides an explanation to the complications of the natural biological systems by artificially re-building them and studying them.

• Synthetic Biology (SB) is at the interface of Engineering and Molecular Biology. The basis of SB is that a cell can be broken down into hierarchies and viewed as a combination of functional elements, just like any machine, allowing construction of complex biological systems from first principles.

• Creating new functionalities or immitating naturally occuring functionalities in biological sytems by building up genetic regulatory networks from standardized compounds.

• New view on synthetic biology, try to engineer biology, life.

• Approaching to biology in a more rigorous, quantitative way, in order to create regulable biological systems.

• Taking biological engineering concepts and expanding them to be abstracted and standardized to ease the 'programming' of biology.

• It's the most simple way to do engineering as well as 'NATURE'

• Synthetic biology is how to make automated programming of living organisms.

• Synthetic Biology is: A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

• To use biological components as pieces of machinery

• Finding a way to create life in a test tube and not using 'alive' precursors

• Synthetic biology applies fundamental engineering concepts like standardization and abstraction to biology in order to allow reliable design of biological devices and systems.

• Decouple life, Construct life

• Novel thought process leads to Innovation and creativity.

• The biological equivalent of digital system design. Hopefully Moore's Law will also be applicable.

• Synthetic+Biology - to artificially inducing a new property in a another living system

• It is an extension of the field of gennetic enginereing which applies enginereing principles to standardise and simplify biological systems and make new ones

• Wants to be the area of engineering organisms, but currently is a crude form of re-engineering organisms. Largely a slow progression of the metabolic engineering from the mid 1980's---slightly more dynamic in its control strategies, though.

• Man-made genetic 'circuits'

• Its the science of trying to understand biology by breaking it down into its simplest parts and then building up from these parts

• To be able to create smaller component parts of the genomic world that can radically alter the abilities of a cell to accomplish specified tasks.

• TV Show

• It is a magic field of study where we can design an artificial genetic network to endow novel biological and non-biological functions to microbes!

• Synthetic Biology can be defined as the field of biology that can be clustered with artificial world in various applications.

• It's just like a jigsaw puzzle, putting different gene sequence together to reach a certain goal.

• Within an organism, re-designing the layout of genes, and further produce biological 'program' to control the behavior of organisms

• It is the emerging discipline which seeks to standardize biology and unlock the potential of new technologies which allow the de novo synthesis of biological components.

• The amalgamation of the fields of mathematics, engineering, life sciences, biology, chemistry and everything in between to come up with novel ways of creating microbes to do things for us.

• The essay to create a functional biological system, starting with the smallest parts

• Abstracting biology concepts with an engineering framework to introduce standards into the field. Like lego.

• The synthetic biology aims to build new biological parts for the creation of new genes and in the future whole genoms. This will provide new opportunities in medicin, biochemics and engineering.

• Trying to save the world