Product Information

Synthetic Biology provides authors with the option to pay a fee for immediate Open Access. The Journal is also NIH compliant. See attached link for further details: http://www.wiley.com/go/nihmandate .

Synthetic biology is an engineering science that seeks to develop the technologies and practices that accelerate the design and engineering of biological systems to solve diverse problems spanning health, environment, agriculture, energy and more. The emerging applications require systems of sufficient complexity that the now standard, somewhat ad-hoc methods of engineering biology are not efficient or often effective. Synthetic biologists seek to meet this challenge. What sets Synthetic Biology apart from the fields of molecular biology and the closely allied fields of genetic and metabolic engineering is the ambition to develop the foundational technologies that will facilitate an engineering process analogous to that which underlies and enables the scalability of, for example, the mechanical, electrical and even civil engineering industries. Current thought suggests that synthetic biologists might create a systematic engineering science founded on the standardization and modularization of cellular “chassis”, part types, part manufacture, part characterization, and part interconnection protocols designed to make biological engineering efficient, reliable, predictable, and scalable to complex technological problems. The analogy to traditional engineering disciplines should not be taken too far, as there are challenges to engineering biology that no internal combustion engine or RISC processor has faced.

Synthetic Biology as a journal will provide a forum for scientific inquiry in this field. The core will be publishing of Research Articles and Technical Reports that exemplify the cutting edge in both foundations and application for synthetic biology. Perspectives and Reviews will help track the major technical innovations and challenges and the rapid evolution of thought that characterizes this new field and engage the community in discussion of the impact of this science on biology, biotechnology, society, and the economy.

Topics of interest to the journal include, but are not limited to reports on:

Applications: Biologically engineered solutions to problems that either rest on synthetic biological principles or demonstrate new challenges for the field.

Parts and Systems: New types of parts and systems, their function, modularity, designability, and application.

Manufacturing technology: New technologies for synthesis of DNA, making of libraries of parts and systems, selection of function and directed evolution, transformation of cells or whole genome engineering, methods for standard assembly, engineered environments for optimizing cellular development for application.

Characterization of parts: Experimental protocols, analytical methods, and theory towards understanding dynamic part function and principles of composition of individually characterized systems, efficient methods for testing robustness or fragility of function, and systems identification.

Design theory and tools: Principles, standards and tools for design and description of biological parts and systems from proteins to whole cells.

The editors will consider papers for publication based on novelty, their immediate or future impact on synthetic biology, and their contribution to the advancement of synthetic biological science. Submission of papers dealing with routine aspects of genetic engineering using established equipment and, and routine applications of established methodologies is discouraged. Theoretical papers will be judged based on the novelty of the approach and their potential impact, or on their novel capability to predict and elucidate experimental observations.