Synthetic biology: From the first synthetic cell to see its current situation and future development

Zhang, LiuYan; Chang, SuHua; Wang, Jing

Chinese researchers have received some achievements on synthetic biology as well. For example, the bioinformatics center of Tianjin University built the Database of Essential Genes (DEG) to collect the published experimental essential genes and provide alignment service [67, 68] . Scientists from the Key Laboratory of System Bioengineering in Tianjin University designed, simulated and constructed an environment-sensitive synthetic microbial ecosystem which provides valuable information for addressing questions in ecology and may act as a chassis for construction of more complex microbial ecosystems [69] . Research team from Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics in Tsinghua University realized the reverse engineering of bacterial chemotaxis pathway by employing control theory and frequency domain analysis [70] . The iGEM team in Peking University continued their awarded project and synthesized a novel genetic sequential logic circuit: A push-on push-off switch which has the ability to generate different outputs in response to the same input signal on the basis of its internal state, and "memorize" the output [26] . Researchers from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) developed and demonstrated reusable and combinable designs for transcriptional logic gates which laid foundation for the reuse and combinational design in synthetic biology [71] . On the other hand, Chinese scientists also actively participated in international collaboration on synthetic biology research. For example, research team from Institute of Psychology, CAS participated in the synthetic biology project, the Programmable Bacterial Catalysts (PROBACTYS), of the 6th Framework Programme of European Union. As the only research team from non-European countries, they made great contribution on genome-scale metabolic network reconstruction and modelling.