We are a group of individuals, groups and labs from various institutions who are committed to engineering biology in an open and ethical manner.

We are currently working to:

• help specify and populate a set of standard parts that have well-defined performance characteristics and can be used (and re-used) to build biological systems,
• develop and incorporate design methods and tools into an integrated engineering environment,
• reverse engineer and re-design pre-existing biological parts and devices in order to expand the set of functions that we can access and program,
• reverse engineer and re-design a 'simple' natural bacterium,
• minimize the genome of natural bacteria and build so-called protocells in the lab, to define the minimal requirements of living entities, and
• construct orthogonal biological systems, such as a genetic code with an enlarged alphabet of base pairs.

This site was originally started by a group of students, faculty and staff from MIT and Harvard. Currently, however, all those interested in Synthetic Biology are invited to contribute and maintain the http://syntheticbiology.org site. To edit the site, you must have an account on OpenWetWare. To obtain an account, visit how to join.