Synthetic biology beyond borders

Underlying every living cell, there is a beautifully concerted circuitry of signalling, metabolism and regulation that, together, orchestrate a variety of functions. Synthetic biology has targeted this circuitry at all levels, engineering it towards a wide array of applications – but also expanding our understanding fundamental aspects of the cell. Fuelled by advances in DNA sequencing, synthesis, editing, and computational modelling and circuit design, synthetic biology has broken tremendous ground in the last decade all across the world. The same way engineers attempt to understand and create complex systems, biologists have strived to dissect and understand the complexities of biological systems. Bringing together both engineers and biologists with diverse backgrounds, the highly successful India-EMBO symposium ‘Engineering meets evolution: Designing biological systems’ was hosted at Chennai, India, in January 2020 – one of the last opportunities to gather in a physical meeting just before the COVID pandemic broke loose. Actually, the rapid and efficient rollout of vaccines designed to handle the COVID crisis is a very palpable example of how synthetic biology can have a positive impact on our daily lives (Brüssow, 2021). Born out of the exciting discussions during the symposium, ‘Synthetic biology beyond borders’, the current issue of Microbial Biotechnology, collates a number of interesting advances in the field from contributors all around the world. Composed by both review and research articles, this special issue covers topics ranging from efficient genome editing of cell factories to metabolic engineering for the production of complex, value-added molecules – with authors from 15 different countries in Europe, America and Asia. As synthetic biology continues to expand horizons, the importance of a special issue that covers a breadth of topics in the field cannot be overstated.