Piecing together a puzzle

Synthetic biology is a new research field that comprises many different projects, approaches and definitions, which, at a first glance, do not apparently have much in common.These approaches include the generation of bioengineered bacteria, artificial protocells or synthetic genomes, as well as pure in silico models of protocells or regulatory and metabolic pathways, all of which are products of synthetic biology.This viewpoint tries to put these various pieces together by defining five categories or subfields of synthetic biology and looking for their common denominators.These five