Synthetic Biology: The Genetic Engineering 2.0

In this thesis work I am going to deal with synthetic biology, a new field of study based on the exploitation of complex genetical circuits made from well-characterized standard sequence pieces, mostly implemented in plasmids for transformation or transfection. Through this work, the technological development of synthetic biology is retraced both from the computational point of view and from the molecular biology one giving, also, some examples of new applications. Briefly, this field shows the symptoms of being very young which means that it needs further developments, however, it is an expanding area with constantly growing community and some application are already available, suggesting that it will continue to improve itself becoming an established “mainstream” science in the not too distant future. Moreover, after some personal bioethical considerations, 3 paper describing different practical applications of synthetic biology are analyzed in the discussion. The first one is about a mathematically modeled eukaryotic circuit, based on the RNAi effect of miRNAs for selectively kill HeLa cancer cells, effectively succeeding in the task. The second one describes the exploitation of Escherichia Coli enveloping a circuit coupled with a cell density sensing molecule, for selectively and successfully kill the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium. The last one, differently from previous 2 dealing with biomedicine, is about an industrial application in which an E. Coli synthetic circuit which self-induces cell lysis once reached a status of starvation and stationary cell growth phase, releasing a macromolecule of interest produced by the bacterium, without using expensive external lysis methodologies. Finally, even if synthetic biology is a newborn science field, it has already developed applicable technologies, prompting that this improvement trend will continue in the future making it an interesting area through which invest resources.