Synthetic Biology Intro and Biosensors

Dr. Ilenne Del Valle and Emm Fulk introduce the topic of synthetic biology in this episode. I start by asking, "What is synthetic biology?" We then begin digging into some of the intricacies of synthetic biology by learning about biosensors; biosensors are a fundamental component of synthetic biology for translating environmental inputs and outputs. We next talk about all the different molecules that biosensors can sense that we could use for various applications.  Our conversation continues with introductions to many additional aspects of synthetic biology. We introduce and discuss synthetic biology circuit diagrams, which is another interesting area where the computational sciences and biological sciences converge. We next introduce CRISPR-based biosensors, synbio AND gates, and other logical operations that can used in the synthetic biology world. Finally, we discuss reporters. We introduce and cover several types of reporters and how they can help indicate which inputs are present. We end with a discussion of how synthetic biology components can be tuned to work even better, and the role bioinformatics can play in the world of synthetic biology. This episode covers the review that both guests cowrote, that can be found here for further reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.618373/full