合成生物学在医药及能源领域的应用

Applications of synthetic biology in medicine and energy

合成生物学是以工程学思想为指导,对天然生物系统进行重新设计与改造,同时设计并合成新的生物元件、模块和系统的崭新学科。合成生物学是自然科学发展到现阶段的产物,并已经在医药、能源等领域取得了一些显著成果。本文综述了在工程细胞中利用合成生物学方法构建抗疟疾药物青蒿素的前体物青蒿二烯,抗癌药物紫杉醇的前体物紫杉二烯,以及脂肪酸酯、脂肪醇、高级醇的合成途径等研究进展。此外,一些重要的合成生物学相关技术,大大加速工程细胞的重构与进化,为构建应用于生产领域的新功能细胞提供方便实用的工具。

Synthetic biology is a new field under the guidance of engineering,which aims to redesign and rebuild natural biological systems,and meanwhile,design and synthesize new biological part,module and system.The advent of synthetic biology represents the tendency of natural science.Some marked achievements have been made in the areas of medicine and energy via synthetic biology methods.On one hand,novel synthesizing pathways have been successfully constructed in engineered cells to produce amorphadiene and taxadiene,which are precursors of antimalarial drug artemisinin and anticarcinogen taxol respectively.On the other hand,the constructions of fatty acid ester,fatty alcohol and higher alcohols synthesizing pathways have also been realized.In addition,several related synthetic bio-techniques accelerate reconstruction and evolution of engineered cells,which would offer convenient tools to construct novel functional cells for the purpose of bio-based manufacture.