scholarly journals Building foundations for an open perspective on synthetic biology research and innovation

2013 ◽  
Vol 200 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenni Rant ◽  
Joyce Tait
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Shapira ◽  
Seokbeom Kwon

A profile of synthetic biology research and innovation is presented using data on publications and patents worldwide and for the UK and selected benchmark countries. The search approach used to identify synthetic biology publications identifies a core set of synthetic biology papers, extracts and refines keywords from these core records, searches for additional papers using those keywords, and supplements with articles published in dedicated synthetic biology journals and curated synthetic biology special collections. For the period from 2000 through to mid-July 2018, 11,369 synthetic biology publication records are identified worldwide. For patents, the search approach uses the same keywords as for publications then identifies further patents using a citation-tree search algorithm. The search covered patents by priority year from 2003 to early August 2018. Following geographical matching, 8,460 synthetic biology basic patent records were identified worldwide. Using this data, analyses of publications are presented which look at the growth of synthetic biology outputs, top countries and leading organizations, international co-authoring, leading subject categories, citations, synthetic biology on the map of science, and funding sponsorship. For patents, the analysis examines growth in patenting, national variations in publications compared with patenting, leading patent assignees, and the positioning of synthetic biology on a visualized map of patents.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Gregorowius ◽  
Anna Deplazes-Zemp

Synthetic biology is an emerging field at the interface between biology and engineering, which has generated many expectations for beneficial biomedical and biotechnological applications. At the same time, however, it has also raised concerns about risks or the aim of producing new forms of living organisms. Researchers from different disciplines as well as policymakers and the general public have expressed the need for a form of technology assessment that not only deals with technical aspects, but also includes societal and ethical issues. A recent and very influential model of technology assessment that tries to implement these aims is known as RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation). In this paper, we introduce this model and its historical precursor strategies. Based on the societal and ethical issues which are presented in the current literature, we discuss challenges and opportunities of applying the RRI model for the assessment of synthetic biology.


2009 ◽  
Vol 187 (5) ◽  
pp. 589-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karmella A. Haynes ◽  
Pamela A. Silver

Synthetic biology aims to engineer novel cellular functions by assembling well-characterized molecular parts (i.e., nucleic acids and proteins) into biological “devices” that exhibit predictable behavior. Recently, efforts in eukaryotic synthetic biology have sprung from foundational work in bacteria. Designing synthetic circuits to operate reliably in the context of differentiating and morphologically complex cells presents unique challenges and opportunities for progress in the field. This review surveys recent advances in eukaryotic synthetic biology and describes how synthetic systems can be linked to natural cellular processes in order to manipulate cell behavior and to foster new discoveries in cell biology research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuhin Chatterjee

Bioinformatics tools and techniques are useful not only to manage and analyze the vast amount of raw biological data generated from various genomics research but also to understand the phenomena of the biological system at the macromolecular level. The development of bioinformatics has come a long way from DNA sequencing tools of the Human Genome Project (HGP) era to DNA circuits and programmable synthetic biological devices in the twenty-first century. The present article attempts to analyze and reveal the emerging trends in bioinformatics and computational biology research and innovation and challenges in patenting them under the current US patent regime.   


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