Programmable cells
The Synthetic Surge
08/11/11 13:44 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK are leading an international team of synthetic biologists in a project that aims to try to create a "reprogrammable cell that can act as the in vivo cell equivalent to a computer's operating system. Clay Dillow in Popular Science wrote that amongst other things, "customized living cells could be tailored to clean up environmental disasters, scrub unwanted carbon from the air, pull pollutants from drinking water, attack pathogens inside the human body, (and) protect food sources from agricultural pests." S. Pelech comments that the use of such terminology such as the creation of "cellular software that would let researchers alter living cells without changing their hardware" and that this would produce a "reprogrammable cell that can act as the in vivo cell equivalent to a computer's operating system" reveals a lack of basic understanding cell biology and what is actually meant by "synthetic biology". Read More...