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Team:Heidelberg/Human Practice/Phips the Phage/General Backround
From 2008.igem.org
Hey - I see, you are a very interested fellow and want to know something about synthetic biology and the background of the work of the iGEM team Heidelberg!!
My name is Phips the phage! You don't know what a phage is? Impossible! We are some of the most important creatures in this world (although some people don't even regard us as living beings!)....
Synthetic Biology
Synthetic Biology is a young field in science, which combines classic gene technology with an engineering approach. Similar to the construction of an airplane, Synthetic Biology uses simple gene building blocks for the construction of new complex systems with distinct functions. So doing Synthetic Biology is like playing with Lego: You have multiple parts, but instead of being made of plastic, they constist of DNA. This DNA can contain the information to built a protein, or it can have a regulatory function. By combining for example a regulatory part that initiates the reading of a gene very efficiently together with a part that contains the information to make a green fluorescent protein, you can built a more complex device, which is able to synthesize GFP at a high rate - the cell will glow green. These gene building blocks are collected in a database by iGEM and can be used by all participants of the competition. So far, the collection contains more than 1000 gene building blocks, due to the continuous development of new parts over the last years.
... to be continued
