Synthetic systems and organisms would essentially operate like biological "factories" or "computers".
The synthetic systems created may be used to generate products ranging from ethanol and drugs to complete synthetic organisms such as complex bacteria that can digest and neutralize toxic chemicals.
Such synthetic systems were modeled after biological systems whose structure included all the necessary information to specify how a complex of different kinds of molecules would assemble and organize without external direction.
RNA shows promise for engineering synthetic systems for controlling gene expression.
Structural and mechanistic features of various synthetic systems are discussed.
In these international contests, university student teams compete to make synthetic systems that work in living cells.
We further discuss opportunities posed by emerging production platforms, namely microbial, plant and synthetic systems.
The work highlights the promise of RNA as a molecular platform for engineering predictable and customized gene regulation systems and potentially using such synthetic systems to treat disease.
Consequently, natural communities and ecosystems can differ from synthetic systems in their reaction to changes in diversity.
However, these synthetic systems fail to accurately recapitulate the biological properties and structure of the native tissue ECM.
The discrepancy in ECM composition strongly affects cell behavior, so it is paramount to reproduce such differences in synthetic systems.
