IGEM - Engineering parts and genetic devices lyrics

Now that you have a brief understanding of what the central dogma is, you can start thinking about more fun things, like how to engineer and control biological functions. Which is what synthetic biology is all about. First, lets talk about some vocabulary related to biological engineering. Biological parts or bioparts, are sequences of DNA that encode for a specific biological function. Parts can refer to protein coding sequences, promoter sequences, a ribosomal binding site, a terminator, and others. Part engineering refers to engineering, or optimizing, different biological sequences to be able to generate parts that are useful to you, the user. The parts can be linked together in specific sequences to form devices, which perform a specific function. A simple genetic device would include a promoter, an RBS, a gene, and a terminator. You can increase the complexity of devices and modulate their genetic function. Multiple devices are networked together to form systems, which perform high level tasks. One common usage of biological systems includes designing a logical function, which can mimic those that are observed in electronic circuits. For example, a simple genetic circuit would be an AND gate where you need two signal molecules which activate two different promoters to activate two different genes which produce two different gene products, which together are needed to activate a third promoter to get the desired gene product. In synthetic biology, we try to standardize different parts in order to easily a**emble devices. These standardized parts are called “BioBricks”, which conform to the BioBrick a**embly standard. The genetic circuits made from biobricks can then be a**embled into living cells, such as E. coli in order to make new biological systems, which perform new functions.