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billybobsky
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Join Date: May 2004
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2010-05-22, 22:08

Quote:
Originally Posted by ezkcdude View Post
Are any of the genes actually synthetic? My understanding is they used actual sequence from a specific bacterial species. To my way of thinking, truly synthetic biology is actually designing genes from scratch, without using living genomes as a template.
You get into a dangerous semantic game when you differentiate between synthetic, meaning chemically or biochemically synthesized, and synthetic, meaning de novo.

It is safer to just use the word synthetic to mean just that -- the genome was entirely synthesized (ie brought together by parts, chemically). It wasn't non-natural, or even artificial (though the use of the term artificial also sends you down a poor rabbit hole -- you get commercials where frozen food is made of entirely real ingredients, as if that means something).

In my field, de novo design of proteins, synthetic carries the burden of meaning something more than just non-natural, hence the definitional guidance...

As far as the broad field is concerned, the use of synthetic is more towards the synthesis direction versus the de novo direction.
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