Engineering novel synthetic biological systems

Engineering principles and new applications for the nascent field of synthetic biology are just beginning to be explored. Here, we report the engineering of four novel synthetic biological systems: (1) a Bacterial Dynamo, for generating electricity using modified magnetotactic bacteria on a microfabricated device; (2) Cancer StickyBots, for targeting and destroying tumour cells using engineered Escherichia coli cells; (3) Human Encryption, an information encoding, storage, and retrieval scheme for potential security and medical diagnostic applications; and (4) X-Verter, new strategies and tools for biological circuit design and BioBrick management. While each of these systems had distinct aims, they shared a common philosophy of rationally building useful and beneficial synthetic biological systems using fundamental engineering principles. They also demonstrated the potential usefulness of BioBricks and contributed to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and synthetic biology community-at-large.