Politics & society, Research

Synthetic biology revolution

By Public Affairs

UC Berkeley established the Synthetic Biology Institute with the goal of creating transformative processes, products and technologies that meet critical demands in energy, health, agriculture, manufacturing and security. Backed by Agilent Technologies, SBI seeks to bridge the gap between today’s small-scale biological engineering and the mass production of synthetic-biological systems across industries. Synthetic biology has the potential to profoundly impact our lives through the development of inexpensive drugs to treat the world’s most intractable health problems, viable transportation biofuels from plants, microbes that target tumors and disease, and an array of other real-world applications from water purification to agricultural crop improvements.