Congratulations Silvia Zenteno

Silvia Zenteno - La creación conducente

“La creación conducente” by Silvia Zenteno, 2012.

Synthetic biology is the result of the integration of a series of knowledge and tools that allow us to design or redesign various functions that can be programmed into different organisms, or at different stages, turning them into novel biological systems. The construction of these new systems based on existing features, is through the implementation of various units operating as interconnected gears, whose sum of activities will produce a particular phenotype. Much of the engineering is carried out through modifications in the coding of different functions or genetic circuits, through the introduction of synthetic units in their genetic material. In turn, these functional models, which could consist of genes and its regulators, are designed based on precise measurements of its various components and activities that help predict their results, although it must be clear that due to the lack of an absolute knowledge, sometimes discrepancies are found between mathematical predictions and the built system. With this redesign of the nucleotide sequence, it is possible to confer exogenous properties to host organism, such as the gene for the GFP fluorescent protein from the jellyfish inserted in various mammals, thus modifying the original behavior of cells. In a more abstract way, it can be seen as the power that gives the current human knowledge in the various fields of science, such as biology, genomics, genetics, mathematics and computer science, to create living "improved " beings with unique capabilities, thereby fusing properties of different species in a directed manner and controlled as possible. In conclusion, synthetic biology is the practical expression of a diversity of scientific knowledge obtained throughout history, and applied to the formation of new forms of life, which in turn could generate new knowledge, on which the design of new systems could be supported, branching into infinite possibilities that would be within reach of our hands.