Emerging trends in synthetic biology: past, present & beyond

With continued advances in molecular biology and the step-change improvements in DNA sequencing technologies, genome engineering has finally come of age.  Not only can synthetic biologists fine tune the carbon flux of microorganisms in order to produce economic yields of many important biomolecules, but genomic approaches now can be employed to harness and improve more complex organisms, including plants.  It is interesting to note that many of the tools and approaches used in today’s biotechnology industry were developed and successfully deployed over twenty years ago, before the turn of the century.  Diversa Corporation was an early biotechnology company founded in 1994, which played a pivotal role in pioneering some of these modern synthetic biological methods.  The premise of Diversa technology was to broadly access uncultured microbial diversity, by employing both cultivation independent and novel HTP microbiological approaches, for discovery of genes and pathways encoding relevant biomolecules. The large collections of natural genes and pathways amassed through the discovery program were next blended using a suite of directed evolution strategies designed to generate combinatorial libraries; the gene variant libraries could then be screened using ultra high throughput methods to identify industrial, chemical and pharmaceutical product candidates.  The approach of accessing natural diversity combined with directed evolution enabled expansion of sequence space and protein fitness in the combinatorial libraries.  Diversa technologies and commercial products developed will be reviewed and nascent trends in synthetic biology discussed.