President Obama's Bioethics Commission was convened to examine the safety and ethical issues around the emerging field of synthetic biology. The Commission offered its assessment to President Obama on December 16, 2010. Among the Commission's eighteen key recommendations:

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.

Prairie View A&M University and the SynBERC Student Leadership Council hosted the second Synthetic Biology Symposium on Friday, November 5, 2010, at the Willie A. Templeton Sr. Memorial Student Center on the Prairie View A&M University campus.

Synthetic biology is an exciting new field of research that combines classic molecular biology and innovative bioengineering techniques. It focuses on the design and construction of new biological entities, such as enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells, and on the redesign of existing biological systems.

With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SynBERC bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

SynBERC investigator Chris Voigt and a group of graduate students from his lab took a leap forward in the pursuit of chemicals derived not from petroleum but from renewable sources. The chemical target was methyl halides, a chemical precursor to several high-value chemicals, and which the oil industry already knows how to derive gasoline from.

This is a test of the SynBERC related nodes system.

A Nature review article by Priscilla Purnick and new SynBERC investigator Ron Weiss offers a peek at how synbio research might shape up. The authors assert that, until now, the field has focused on the non-trivial challenge of combining basic elements (promoters, RBSs, repressors, etc.) into functional and robust modules (switches, pulse generators, cascades, etc.). These efforts have allowed control over the “central dogma” of cellular function (transcription, translation, and post-translational control).

Two meetings in the Bay Area have taken a fresh look at the role of computerized automation in the design of biological systems. The first meeting, which took place on July 26 at Stanford and was sponsored by the BioBricks Foundation, was intended to further develop a data and information exchange standard(s) supporting synthetic biology.