Synthetic Biology

We are a group of individuals from various institutions who are committed to engineering biology in an open and ethical manner. We are currently working to help specify and populate a set of standard parts that have well-defined performance characteristics and can be used (and re-used) to build biological systems; develop and incorporate design methods and tools into an integrated engineering environment; reverse engineer and re-design pre-existing biological parts and devices in order to expand the set of functions that we can access and program; reverse engineer and re-design a 'simple' natural bacterium. This site was originally started by a group of students, faculty and staff from MIT and Harvard. Currently, however, all individuals interested in Synthetic Biology are invited to contribute and maintain the http://syntheticbiology.org site.