My Journey Through Synthetic Biology

For decades, scientists have edited and tweaked DNA to change how they function. These edits have contributed to thousands of innovations spanning from engineering bacteria to produce insulin to creating pest-resistant crops. Genetic engineering allows for these innovations and has shaped much of modern biotechnology. But now, synthetic biology(SynBio) is taking it a step further: it doesn't just edit life, it designs it. In this blog, I'll talk about what makes SynBio different from genetic engineering. What is Genetic Engineering? Before I go into how SynBio has played off of genetic engineering, let me give you a little background on what it is. Genetic engineering is a process introduced in the 1970s that involves directly modifying an organism’s DNA to change how it behaves or what it produces. The most classic example of genetic engineering is inserting the human insulin gene into bacteria to produce insulin for diabetic patients.  The core concept behind genetic engineer...

Did you know that every cell in your body holds a 3-billion-letter instruction manual? As crazy as that sounds, it was only recently that we've developed the tools to actually read and understand what it's telling us.  The instruction manual I'm talking about is the 3 billion base pairs of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) inside each human cell. Each of these base pairs are formed by specific pairings of the 4 nucleotide bases: adenine (A) with thymine (T), and guanine (G) with cytosine (C). Anything from growing your hair to fighting diseases can be accounted for by this code.  However, even with its importance, trying to read and understand DNA code proved complicated and expensive. Think about it like this, a computer codes using 0s and 1s. The human body codes using A, T, C, and G, which is infinitely more complex. Sophisticated machines, called sequencers were needed to decode the DNA into useful information. The first sequencers used Sanger Sequencing, which at the time wa...

Imagine a world where humans could program life like we were in a video game. In a nutshell, that’s kind of what SynBio allows us to do.  At its core, SynBio is a game-changing practice where biology, engineering, and computer science merge together to design, build, and modify biological systems. SynBio manipulates nature through scientific techniques so that scientists can become “architects”. Their creations can be applied to a variety of issues, solving problems from fighting disease to reconstructing agriculture on all levels. What makes SynBio different from any other science is that instead of studying and trying to understand nature and the world around us, scientists focus on applying the understanding we already have into designing and building artificial biological systems.  From my research, it’s basically like editing a book: researchers can add, delete, or rewrite genetic sequences to change an organism’s function. Specifically, scientists have been able to make ...

I've always known that I wanted to do something in STEM. Ever since middle school, I’ve been drawn to the interesting concepts of coding, numbers, puzzles, and the big “what if?” questions my teachers would pose. I would design experiments at home to test hypotheses and do my own research in areas that interested me. That said, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Today, there's so much pressure placed on students my age to have everything figured out; And for a long time, I knew there was something in STEM for me, I just couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. It wasn’t until early sophomore year, during my English class, that something clicked for me in STEM: synthetic biology (SynBio). Here’s some context. During my sophomore year, we began our Team Multimedia Presentation (TMP) for the AP Seminar Exam curriculum. My class was divided into groups of 2–5, given the AP's general topic (“something to do with ethics”), and asked to conduct research in order to ma...