Synthetic Biology: Emerging Science

The living world provides extraordinarily rich yet largely unexplored mechanisms for understanding how nature controls and processes information, materials, and energy.

Learning how to effectively harness the power of the living world and replicate its systems is what synthetic biology is all about. It has the potential to help us solve complex challenges like species preservation and biodiversity, develop new vaccines and drug therapies, create biofuels from plants, optimize the food supply, and improve bioremediation—the bioengineering of organisms to attack waste or pollution in water or soil.

 Life Technologies has been exploring synthetic biology as part of a business that would include various technologies, some already in our portfolio and others that will be developed or acquired. We already sell Vector NT I®, one of the most widely used software packages for molecular biology in the world. It is used by researchers for molecular cloning, sequence analysis, data management, vector selection, and design of expression constructs. We help our customers leverage this software platform to develop new applications for synthetic biology. With greater investment in synthetic biology, Life Technologies is supporting accelerated research into solutions for the pressing problems of the 21st century.

Biofuel Spotlight:

Converting Algae to Biofuel

Algae has enormous potential not only to diminish our reliance on petroleum as a fuel, but to effectively sequester carbon as well. more

Today, the process of converting algae to biofuel is energy-intensive and expensive, but the US Department of Energy and a group of industry partners that includes Life Technologies is exploring synthetic biology as a way to create affordable and plentiful algae-based biofuels. In 2010 the group pledged a total of $12 million to create a Consortium for Algal Biofuels Commercialization. The goal of the program is to develop new genetic and molecular technologies that can improve algal fuel production, as well as new approaches for recycling nutrients and technologies for producing crops. Life Technologies is contributing sequencing capabilities via the SOLiD® 4 System, and also creating kits with vectors, media, and reagents needed for algae research.


Renewable Energy

We are taking steps towards synthetic biology as a solution for renewable energy more

Life Technologies and SG Biofuels, Inc., a bioenergy crop company, used the SOLiD® 4.0 System to sequence the Jatropha curcas genome, advancing the development of this oilseed-producing crop as a source for biofuel. Resistant to drought and pests and able to thrive in locations not desirable for food crops, these oil-packed, nonedible seeds are a high-yielding and low-cost source as feedstock substitutes for diesel, petrochemical, and jet fuel industries.