My Journey Through Synthetic Biology

Hey everyone! I hope you all are staying warm, as snowstorms are sweeping across the United States. We’ve already gotten like 6 inches, and it’s still snowing.  After I talked about regenerative medicine last week, I figured I would look even deeper into it and found a super interesting wrinkle that comes directly out of it: organoids. Think about it like this: if regenerative medicine focuses on fixing damaged tissues, organoids are the technology that allows scientists to watch how those tissues form in the first place. What Are Organoids? Organoids are mini, simplified versions of organs grown from stem cells. They aren’t full organs, and they’re not meant to be implanted (at least not yet), but they do mimic many of the structures and functions of real organs. What makes organoids so incredible is that scientists don’t manually assemble them cell by cell. Instead, stem cells are placed in the right environment with the right signals, and the cells self-organize. They divide, sp...

Hey everyone! I hope all of you have had a good week since I last posted. Anyway, for today’s blog, I thought now would be a good time to pivot to one of my mom’s favorite topics to talk about at the dinner table: regenerative medicine. Before I get started, I’ll give you some context. Basically, until now, much of medicine has been about managing damage. If an organ fails, we replace it. If tissue is injured, we try to repair it as best we can. Unlike typical medicines, regenerative medicine offers a unique ability: the ability to teach the body how to rebuild itself. What Is Regenerative Medicine? Regenerative medicine is the field focused on restoring or replacing damaged tissues by harnessing the body’s own biological systems. Instead of relying solely on transplants, drugs, or mechanical devices, this field uses the cells themselves to trigger natural healing processes. Synthetic biology plays a huge role here because it allows scientists to control how cells behave. Rather than f...

Hey everyone, welcome back! For this week’s blog, I wanted to take a step away from the hypotheticals and dive into a part of synthetic biology that I haven’t talked about yet. Honestly, I think it’s one of the coolest subfields I’ve come across so far. Up until now, a lot of my blogs have focused on editing genes: changing DNA, programming cells, or rewriting biological instructions. But what if the real question isn’t just what cells do, but how they organize themselves? That’s where morphogenetic engineering comes in. What Is Morphogenetic Engineering? Morphogenetic engineering might sound super complex, but it’s actually a pretty intuitive idea. Morphogenesis is the process by which cells organize themselves into tissues, organs, and entire bodies. It’s how a single fertilized cell somehow knows how to become something as complex as a heart, a brain, or a hand. Instead of focusing only on telling cells what proteins to make, scientists in this field try to control how cells move, w...

Hey everyone! First of all, I wanted to wish everyone reading a very happy New Year! It’s been a long year of writing blogs, and I cannot be more grateful for all the support I’ve gotten throughout my journey in Synthetic Biology.  This week, I wanted to do something a little more fun. Honestly, I think about it all the time while watching movies. If you’ve ever seen a sci-fi movie, you know the drill. Someone gets exposed to radiation, injected with a mystery serum, or bitten by something weird… and suddenly they have superpowers, glowing eyes, or instant healing abilities. As cool as that is, most of the biology in sci-fi movies is wildly inaccurate. But here’s the interesting part: some of it isn’t as wrong as you might think. So let’s break down what sci-fi gets wrong about biology, and what it surprisingly gets right. What Sci-Fi Usually Gets Wrong 1. Instant Biological Changes In movies, biology works instantly. One injection, one mutation, one accident: boom. New abilities. ...