As Scotland's synbio-engineers at the Universities of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh and Dundee, working with Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Blood Transfusion Service, get their heads down on the 5-year project to generate red blood cells, establish new bio-engineering and manufacturing capacity, the  world maps of synbio projects are becoming a groundswell movement to even include your Twitter synbio project link

One of the keenest players in the game is inevitably, University of California, Berkeley, which has launched a new institute of synthetic biology and bioengineering, signing up Agilent Technologies as its first industry partner, and linking its (SBI) with other UC Berkeley centers involved in synbio as well as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), seeking to apply these new technologies in medicine, energy, the environment, and other research areas.

Agilent is helping to launch the center with a "multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment" and providing access to its technologies and scientists, the university said. The interdisciplinary center has 33 faculty members and scientists from eight departments at the school and four LBNL divisions, including engineering, chemical sciences, and biology.

SBI's core goals are to increase biological systems understanding, develop transferable bioengineering tools, and design rules for building biological components and systems for an array of applications. The center will also address potential ethical and social synbio impacts.

"Synthetic biology potentially can have as profound an impact in the 21st Century as semiconductor technology had in the 20th," William Sullivan, Agilent's president & CEO.
"To get there, we need to engineer biological
solutions that are scalable, reliable, and safe...precisely what UCB BSynthetic Biology Institute is addressing, and why Agilent is enthusiastic about providing expertise, infrastructure, and funding for this."

Matthew Tirrell, (right) Bioengineering department chair  at  UC Berkeley and SBI's founding director:  "SBI seeks to bridge the gap between the small-scale, biological engineering of the present and industrial level production, by developing design tools and other infrastructure to produce synthetic biological systems reliably on a large scale."

One of the global groundswell creation movements has to be the International Genetically Engineered Machine iGEM competition aimed at young academics, (winners in 2010). It kicks off in June, with Stamford first hosting Biobricks. In October in Amsterdam, hosted by Vrije Universiteit, TUDelft and University of Groningen, is the European iGEM jamboree, others held in the Americas andAsia with a l November World Championship final held at MIT "Source plates are half way to distribution and all the  mini prepping is on (right) robot this year.'

The iGEM event may seem like science fiction, but someof the spin-offs are serious business, with some of the “biological parts” (left: parts & devices catalogue) created and stored in a library called the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, including the building blocks for biosensors and synthetic red blood cells.

Supporting the iGEM event is a long-term investment for Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) But Group leader, Mike Tyers,  Synbiostandards member is convinced it will be worth it. “As synthetic biology starts to take off the revolution in molecular biology will pale in comparison.”

E.chromi, a synbio design that emerged In 2009, when James King and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg collaborated with the Cambridge iGEM team, engineering E.coli bacteria to secrete coloured pigments visible to the naked eye.

In this collaboration they developed a timeline, proposing ways that a foundational technology such as E.chromi could develop over the next century, scenarios including food additives, water pollution indicators, patenting issues, personalised medicine, terrorism and new types of weather.

They explored the different agendas that could shape the use of E.chromi and in turn, our everyday lives. E.chromi technology thas been designed at both the genetic and the human scale, setting a precedent for future science designer collaborations.

Synbio from an off-the-shelf spare parts scenario also is increasingly seen at work in bioartificial organs. Take the artificial cornea using biomaterials has been designed at the University of Granada,  which extracted pig corneal cells, replacing them with human stem cells (decellularisation and recellulation) to make bioartificial organs. 

The University of Granada research group composed of Professors Antonio Campos and Miguel Alaminos (histologists), María del Mar Pérez, Ana Ionescu and Juan de la Cruz Cardona (opticians) ophthalmologist Miguel González Andrades, University Hospital San Cecilio, Granada.

Researchers extracted pig corneal cells and replaced them with human stem cells. This allows scientists to maintain the basic structure of the cornea and replace its cellular components. The same research group made an artificial cornea with biomaterials designed at the Tissue Engineering Laboratory (still at feasibility and design phase) of the University of Granada, and preparatory to starting a clinical trial.

Last autumn The Daily Mail reported  that implantable artificial kidneys developed could bypass dialysis. The collaborative developed kidney effort by engineers, biologists and physicians, led by Dr Shuvo Roy at  University of California San Francisco plan to apply silicon technology,  to shrink the device.

The team has established the feasibility of an implantable model in animal models and plans to be ready for clinical trials in five to seven years.

Currently Dr Roy (right) is headlines with a SMART diaphragm, a low-cost wireless device, embedded sensors to detect decreasing levels of collagen in the cervix – an indicator of impending pre-term labor – communicating results via any Bluetooth-enabled device to a physician monitored cloud database.

In the US, the Us synthetic biology labs, Synthetic Biology project is a Foresight & Governance program of Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. It holds a maps inventory of synthetic biology described "convergence of molecular biology, IT and nanotechnology, leading to systematic design of biological systems."

Currently the research market is at $600m and the potential put at more than $3.5bn in the next decade, or that the chemical industry could be dependent on synthetic biology by 2015.

The US finds some 184 site in the US and 51 in Europe, but that map is only concentrated on those two regions. This is a database that inevitably has to include the entire spectrum of global players.