System bioParts

System bioParts (our own term) is a strategy for strain development in which parts derived whenever possible from the same species used to engineer strains for new and optimized functions. One feature of our approach to synthetic biology is to make use of system bioParts whenever this is appropriate and possible in microbial strain engineering. The underlying rationale is that parts derived from the same species share core metabolic conditions and regulatory networks, as well as probably many unknown system-behavioural determinants, that mean that the more closely related the donor and recipients – the more likely the newly constructed strain is to work efficiently.

System bioParts are the product of evolution, which can be either: short term (for example derived from evolutionary experiments in which strains are put under specific selection for desirable new properties) or long term (derived from evolved diversity present within populations of unrelated strains of the same species).

The key components of the System bioParts approach are:

• The strain collections for synthetic biology
• Comparative Behavioural Genomics
• Serial Re-sequencing of Evolving Populations

An essential underpinning activity for all of these components is the development of:

• Novel bioinformatics resources for microbial genomics for synthetic biology