Synthetic Biology

Bridge Synthetic lichen-like microbial consortia engineered for biofabrication on Earth are functional analogs of the self-sustaining biosystems required for off-world resource utilisation.

Fields: Synthetic Biology, Astrobiology, Materials Science, Ecology

Lichen — obligate mutualistic consortia of photosynthetic partners (algae or cyanobacteria) and heterotrophic fungi — are among Earth's most extreme-environment colonisers because the consortium achie...

Bridge CRISPR-Cas9 programmable endonuclease — guided by 20-nt sgRNA to a PAM-adjacent target — creates precise double-strand breaks repaired by NHEJ or HDR, enabling base editors (A→G without DSB) and prime editors (any 12-nt change via reverse transcriptase) now entering clinical use for sickle cell disease (FDA 2023).

Fields: Biology, Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Medicine, Genomics

The CRISPR-Cas9 system (Doudna-Charpentier Nobel 2020) repurposes a prokaryotic adaptive immune mechanism as a precision genome-engineering tool. The single-guide RNA (sgRNA) — a fusion of CRISPR RNA ...

Bridge CRISPR Diagnostics and Point-of-Care Testing — SHERLOCK and DETECTR exploit Cas13/Cas12 collateral cleavage for attomolar-sensitivity, paper-based pathogen detection

Fields: Molecular Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Diagnostics, Synthetic Biology, Public Health

Beyond gene editing, CRISPR-associated nucleases are powerful diagnostic biosensors that exploit the same guide-RNA base-pairing specificity used in genome editing but repurposed for target detection....

Bridge Synthetic biology applies electrical engineering design principles to genetic circuits: Gardner's toggle switch (2000) implements bistable flip-flop logic, Elowitz's repressilator (2000) implements a ring oscillator, and retroactivity from circuit loading — analogous to impedance mismatch — requires biological insulator modules to compose circuits without unintended cross-coupling.

Fields: Biology, Synthetic Biology, Engineering, Control Theory, Systems Biology, Genetic Circuits

Synthetic biology (Endy 2005) applies electrical engineering abstraction principles — modularity, standardization, composability — to genetic parts. The toggle switch (Gardner et al. 2000): two mutual...

Bridge Synthetic Biology x Electronic Circuit Design - gene circuits as logic gates

Fields: Biology, Computer Science, Synthetic Biology

Synthetic gene circuits implement Boolean logic (toggle switches, oscillators, band-pass filters) using the same design principles as electronic circuits; the repressilator (three-gene ring oscillator...

Bridge Synthetic biology applies electronic circuit design principles to genetic systems — using transcription factors as NOT/AND/NOR gates, implementing the repressilator (genetic ring oscillator) and toggle switch (genetic flip-flop), and employing transfer functions and Bode plots from control theory to engineer programmable living systems.

Fields: Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Control Theory, Biology, Synthetic Biology, Molecular Biology

Elowitz & Leibler (2000) and Gardner et al. (2000) — published simultaneously in Nature — demonstrated that gene regulatory networks can be engineered to implement electronic circuit functions. The re...

Bridge Xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs) with chemically modified backbones (HNA, CeNA, LNA, FANA, TNA) can store and propagate genetic information through in vitro evolution, demonstrating that the Watson-Crick hydrogen-bonding code is substrate-independent: Darwinian evolution does not require the ribose- phosphate backbone of natural DNA/RNA.

Fields: Synthetic Biology, Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Origins Of Life

Pinheiro et al. (2012) evolved polymerases capable of transcribing DNA into six different XNAs and back-transcribing XNA into DNA, demonstrating faithful information transfer across the chemical bound...