HonKong - Synthetic Bio, students program DNA, new computers, synthetic fuel or disaster ?

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- As bioengineers continue to build things with the stuff of life itself, the rest of the world is slowly waking up to the power of synthetic biology.

Panel from the educational comic book "Adventures in Synthetic Biology"

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While students tinker away in labs making bacteria turn red or green, many more developed commercial enterprises are already working towards potentially revolutionary projects, such as making the components of renewable, portable fuels and medical treatments for epidemic diseases.

It's no wonder that venture capitalists are already knocking at their doors.

What is synthetic biology?

In a nutshell, synthetic biology is the rational engineering of biological parts, devices and systems, by programming DNA to design and re-design organisms to do what we want them to do -- something like using a computer to rewire living things, and by extension, to create new ones.

"Synthetic biology is just biotechnology done better, faster and cheaper,"sums up Talli Somekh of Musea Ventures, which he co-founded in 2007 in order to create and invest in new companies in the field of alternative energy.

"There's an element of irrational speculation about synthetic biology, because people seem to think that it's something entirely new and revolutionary. But the truth is that it's really just applying principles of disciplined construction to something that has for too long been a lab science."

"The goal is to make all of biology easier to engineer," says Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and president of the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the "open source" development of synthesized biological parts.

"Over time, the application space becomes anything that biology can manufacture. It's like looking at an Apple computer in 1975 and saying, 'What do we use this for?'"

In the labs

So far, ideas aren't lacking. But before we can expect pet cyborgs, a cure for cancer and the end of global warming, we need to take life one cell at a time.

One petri dish of innovation is the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition, held every year by BBF since 2003, in which student teams use BioBricks to design new biological systems that operate in living cells, as well as contribute new bricks to the registry.

This year's iGEM sees 84 teams of some 1,000 participants from 21 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S., who will present their projects at the iGEM Championship Jamboree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on November 8-9, 2008.

Among them, the HKUSTers, a team of post-graduate, undergraduate and high school students representing the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is engineering a "gambling" cell baptized the Randomizer, based on the principle of randomness in nature.

When stimulated, the bacteria will turn either red or green in color, simulating the metaphorical flip of the coin. Using this binary logic, multi-digit random numbers can be generated.

HKUSTers team leader Professor King L. Chow says the Randomizer uses about 12 existing BioBricks and will contribute about four or five more useful ones to the registry. Ultimately, one could imagine these new biological parts being applied to the creation of a living supercomputer.