A Different Approach to Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biologists reuse, repurpose, and reconfigure biological systems to address society's most pressing challenges. The budding field is a cornerstone of biotechnology that relies on lessons from biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, and the social sciences.

Training future synthetic biologists to understand concepts from all of those fields requires a unique framework, one that focuses not just on how research can be done but why research should be done.

Researchers at Northwestern University developed such a framework.

The team of 17 researchers, including Northwestern Engineering Master of Biotechnology Program (MBP) director Danielle Tullman-Ercek, co-authored an article in Nature Communications that explains the framework.

Rather than focusing on individual fields, the framework deconstructs biotechnologies across five scales:

• Societal 
• Biological communities 
• Cell/cell-free systems 
• Circuit/network 
• Molecular 

This scaled approach allows for a more entrepreneurial mindset as students are able to integrate cross-disciplinary concepts while they develop new innovations. 

"What is so great is we put that societal scale first, and it should come first when you're thinking about how to solve a problem," said Tullman-Ercek, who co-directs Northwestern's Center for Synthetic Biology along with professor Julius Lucks. "Maybe you want to develop a new cancer drug, and you want to understand the interaction of the drug with a cancerous cell or with proteins in the cell. That's all very important, but you need to back up and first think about whether having this answer would address the key challenge for treating that cancer."

When thinking at the societal level, synthetic biologists should ask if there is a better target for their work that could affect more people, or improve each person's quality of life by a more significant amount. Synthetic biologists should consider if a medication they create is something people will want to take. How simple will the delivery process be? Is it something that can be ingested easily or will consumers be in the hospital in order to take it? 

"You really have to put that societal experience first and make sure it's weighed against how to implement a solution," Tullman-Ercek said. "It's all fine and good if we find a miracle cure that works in a mouse, but if it doesn't work in a human, then was the knowledge gained worth the resources spent? Or should we have set higher goals? This framework allows us to focus on developing something that will work in humans to begin with." 

Multiple MBP classes are already adopting the framework, including Introduction to Synthetic Biology and Deconstructing Synthetic Biology. In the courses, students learn about challenges at every scale of biology and then consider how those challenges can be addressed.  

Classes feature fewer instructors standing before the class and giving a lot of information for students to memorize. Instead, the classroom experience features more group work to understand the issues being discussed and then work through how synthetic biology could be used to address them. 

This setup also enables students to practice their collaboration and communication skills as they work across disciplines to address each challenge, be it a problem related to medicine or a sustainable application for developing new materials.

The point is that students don't start with a solution and try to find a problem to solve. Instead, they learn about the problems at hand and then work together to identify possible solutions. 

"This is not a new model in the education field, but it's new for synthetic biology," Tullman-Ercek said. "Instead of teaching all the different pieces of synthetic biology and then telling students to go find a problem to solve, we're teaching about the problem first and then helping students learn the concepts they need to address it."