Oscillator

"Synthetic" Biology and Evolution by Symbiosis

I like using synthetic to mean “working together”, in “real” synthetic biology as bringing together (synthesizing) a lot of components from different living things in order to create a unique whole, and in “natural” biology in terms of how every living thing must live together with others in communities made up of complex interdependent relationships. I’ve recently been reading a lot of Lynn Margulis’s work on Serial Endosymbiotic Theory (SET): how eukaryotic cells developed through multiple endosymbiotic events between different species of bacteria, with early cooperative relationships leading to intricate co-dependence and entire new domains of life. I love this picture from her article “Serial endosymbiotic theory and composite individuality” for its complexity and for highlighting how deeply connected all life on earth is. We are all synthetic communities.

Evolution, ecology and the engineered organism

Synthetic biology is fascinating and scary because of evolution. Evolution leads to the incredible diversity of biological systems that synthetic biology can draw from to create new designs, and evolution can be used in the lab to optimize synthetic biology pathways and make them better. However, because cells evolve and interact with the environment, synthetic biology is scary—what will happen when synthetic cells evolve and change in “real” ecological environments? Most synthetic biologists agree that evolution will likely make synthetic cells unfit to survive in the wild, and that evolution is something that synthetic biology systems need to be insulated from in order to maintain proper behavior (given the chance, most living cells would get rid of whatever synthetic pathway they were forced to make, since it would likely compete with the cell for natural resources). A new opinion article by Jeffrey Skerker, Julius Lucks and Adam Arkin, Evolution, ecology and the engineered organism: lessons for synthetic biology in the most recent issue of Genome Biology goes into a lot of these issues; how evolution is both useful and dangerous for synthetic biology, and how to minimize the disruption of natural ecologies as synthetic biology moves forward.

Here’s figure 1 from the article, which I think accurately reflects how everything is connected and how vague our understanding is about these connections and how little we know about what will happen in the future of synthetic biology:

Figure 1 Ecological forces drive evolution, which in turn influences ecologies. This cycle creates a diverse array of functions that can be used in synthetic designs. Individual functions may be combined and evolved in the laboratory to create new synthetic systems that may ultimately enter natural ecologies.