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Synthetic Biology: challenges ahead
1Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia-CSIC Madrid, Spain vlorenzo, valencia@cnb.uam.es
2EMBL Heidelberg, Germany serrano@embl-heidelberg.de
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This expanding scientific discipline is proving extremely popular and is attracting engineering and system design experts to the field of Biology.
As Bioinformatics and Computational Biology will be essential components of new technical and scientific developments, it is vital to follow the discussion generated by the recent ESF Exploratory Workshop (October 1316, 2005, Constructing and de-constructing Life, Magalia, Spain) and the 2005 report of the NEST High-Level Expert Group on Synthetic Biology: Applying Engineering to Biology http://www.eurosfaire.prd.fr/nest/documents/pdf/NEST_syntheticbiology_b5_eur21796_en.pdf)
Synthetic Biology stands at the meeting-point of two cultures. The first, represented by those interested in deconstructing