If there’s a point that may be lost in my recent take on synthetic biology, published this week in The Chronicle Review, it’s this: Once you get past the inflated rhetoric, synthetic biology still oozes a revolutionary vibe.
Last year, when I visited the lab of Jim Collins, one of the field’s founders, his team was coming off the creation of a plug-and-play “breadboarding” system for microbes. It’s an idea inspired by electrical engineering, where plastic “breadboards” serve as experimental bases for tweaking circuits without the permanence of soldering. Collins’s method allows much the same, but in bacteria.
There are plenty of tools around for inserting bits of DNA into bugs with some precision. But given the messiness of life, things rarely work out right the first time around. The team’s method makes pulling biological parts out of the DNA much easier, said Raffi B. Afeyan, an …