Biodesign: a Prevalent Cultural Trope

A new science or technology field really starts to capture the imagination and become mainstream when it seeps into art and culture. This is increasingly evident with bioart, bioprinting, and synthetic biology.

In bioart (using biological materials to make art), there have already been several phases starting with bacteria drawings in petri dishes and more recently culminating in DNA manipulation, live cells growing into cultured shapes in galleries, and the Algae Opera (an opera singer’s CO2 producing algae in real-time for audience consumption).

Bioprinting is an emerging field which marries the 3D printing revolution with biohacking and DIYlabs in the 3D printing of designed human materials for aesthetic and functional purposes.  

Synthetic biology (the design and construction of biological devices and systems) is being featured in art shows alongside industry conferences and in film festivals, including in its own Bio-Fiction, an international synthetic biology science, art, and film festival series.

Not only are we making art with biology as an artistic material, culture is being made in new ways through biology. 

The theme of biodesign is becoming prevalent as a cultural trope through the rapid expansion of designed biology into the arts, culture, collective human consciousness, and science and technology. These ideas are becoming quite normal, which can only mean that their demise through kitschification and cliché could be coming soon in a subsequent era of anti-bioart, post-bioprinting, post-synbio!

Synbio update: reference standards, protein fusions, and bioscaffolds

One of the core tools developed and used by synthetic biologists is the Registry of Standard Biological Parts which has over 5,000 available parts (paper). A contemporary research focus is on improving methods for working with the standardized parts. Three recent innovations are described below.

1. In vivo reference standards
One advance is in establishing in vivo reference standards for the different biological parts. For example, the absolute activity of different promoters (gene transcription regulators) varies across experimental conditions and measurement instruments. Variation in promoter activity was reduced 50% by using a selected promoter as an in vivo reference standard against which other promoters were measured (paper).

2. Construction of protein fusions
Another advance is in allowing the construction of protein fusions. This is not feasible in the current assembly standard due to an unfavorable scar sequence that encodes an in-frame stop codon. Restriction enzymes BglII and BamHI are employed in a new assembly standard that replaces the scar sequence with a generally innocuous glycine-serine peptide linker (paper).

3. Rapid circuit generation with BioScaffolds
A third advance is in the creation of a new part, a BioScaffold, that can be used in the rapid generation of synthetic biological circuits. The BioScaffold can be inserted into cloning vectors and excised from them to leave a gap into which other DNA elements can be placed. Targeted circuit modification simplifies and speeds up the iterative design-build-test process through the direct reuse of existing circuits (paper).