6. Synthetic biology for basic research

Abstract

Synthetic biology has been built on the foundations of a vast amount of fundamental knowledge about how genes, proteins, and living cells and tissues work. It is now paying back its debt to science by providing sophisticated tools for analysis of natural systems, and testing hypotheses and ideas. ‘Synthetic biology for basic research’ presents a few examples from many, including how synthetic biology is being used as a tool for enquiry in neuroscience and embryology, and its importance in verifying that we understand biology as well as we think we do. An example of a large-scale synthetic biology experiment designed to test hypotheses about genomes is the Yeast 2.0 project.