My Journey Through Synthetic Biology

Hey everyone, and welcome to blog number 40! It’s been almost a year since I posted my first blog, and it's crazy to see how far I’ve come. For this week’s blog, I thought about the last two weeks of topics. And after writing about gene regulation and epigenetics, I started thinking about a question that sounds almost impossible at first. If cells can specialize into different types during development, do they remain stuck in that specialization forever?  And, for a long time, scientists thought the answer was yes. Once a cell became a muscle cell, neuron, or skin cell, that identity was considered permanent. But modern biology has revealed something much more interesting. In some cases, cells can change their identity, a process called transdifferentiation. What Is Transdifferentiation? Transdifferentiation occurs when one mature cell type directly converts into another mature cell type. Importantly, the cell does not first return to a stem-cell state. Instead, it switches identit...

Hey everyone! Welcome back to the blog series. After last week’s blog on gene regulation, I kept thinking about other fundamental science topics I should talk about. And after looking through Google for about 2 hours today, I decided to write and dive deeper into a perspective of the Synthetic Biology world that is frequently mentioned in my AP Bio class: Epigenetics.  So far in this series, we’ve learned that genes can be turned on or off. But, what actually controls whether parts of DNA are even accessible in the first place? This question is an important one to ask because of one important aspect of Biology: just because a gene exists doesn’t mean a cell can easily use it.  What Is Epigenetics? Epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression that don’t involve altering the DNA sequence itself. The DNA code stays the same, but how that code is read can change. If gene regulation is about deciding which genes to activate, epigenetics is about controlling how accessible those...

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my blog. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on complex applications of Synthetic Biology. So, today I wanted to take a step back, zoom out, and focus on something fundamental.  The question I’m focusing on today is pretty simple: How does a cell decide what genes to turn on? Every tissue, every organ, and every biological response ultimately comes down to which genes are active and which ones aren’t. That’s where gene regulation and transcriptional control come in. If DNA Is the Same, Why Are Cells Different? Did you know that almost every cell in your body contains the exact same DNA? Your neurons, muscle cells, skin cells, and immune cells all carry the same genetic code. So why don’t they all look and behave the same? The answer isn’t in the DNA sequence itself. It’s in which parts of the DNA are being read. Gene regulation is the process that determines which genes are turned “on” or “off” in a cell at a given time. Transcri...

Hey everyone! First and foremost, I wanted to apologize for missing last week’s blog. Flu B has been making its way around the community, and unfortunately, it decided to pay me a visit. But I’m finally feeling better and ready to get back into it. As I started looking for this week’s topic, I wanted something that naturally built off where I left off. After going down what felt like thousands of Google searches, I stumbled onto an interdisciplinary field within synthetic biology that honestly might be one of the coolest connections I’ve seen so far: It’s where biology crosses into physics. When I usually talk about cells, it’s typically about how they respond to signals like hormones, proteins, and DNA instructions. However, today, that’s only a small part of the story. Today and in nature, cells don’t just respond to chemicals. They respond to force. That idea is the foundation of something called mechanobiology. What Is Mechanobiology? Mechanobiology is the study of how cells sense ...

Hello and welcome back to this week’s Synthetic Biology Blog. I know I typically post on Sundays, but with a big Psychology project I plan to do tomorrow, I wanted to make sure to get a new update to this series out to you. For this week’s blog, I wanted to build directly off what we talked about last week with organoids and mini-organs. Organoids showed us that cells are surprisingly good at organizing themselves. But there’s another huge piece of the puzzle that we haven’t talked about yet: what those cells are actually growing on. This is where tissue engineering and biomaterials come in. If cells are the builders, biomaterials are the scaffolding.  What Is Tissue Engineering? Tissue engineering is a field focused on rebuilding or repairing tissues by combining living cells with engineered materials. Instead of replacing damaged tissue with metal or plastic, the goal is to create living tissue that integrates naturally with the body. In simple terms, tissue engineering tries to ...