Many applications of Synthetic Biology are established on the foundation of genetic engineering (or known as recombinant DNA technology). The idea of genetic engineering is to obtain our genes of interest and transform cells with these genes, or simply speaking it refers to the ways to manipulate the genetic material in organisms, to make the organisms gain certain characteristics we wanted. Here below provides possible procedures of achieving this.

Growing genes

Growing genes is an essential process of genetic engineering. Producing required genes in a large quantity would allow researchers to acquire significant amount of raw materials required for development. The larger the amount of genes, the more probable it is going to be successful in engineering... (Read more)

References

1 Genetic engineering - New Oxford American Dictionary

DNA sequencing

One particularly essential task performed by genetic engineers is sequencing of the DNA molecules. This is a process which determines the sequence of nucleotides in a DNA molecule. Recall what we know about DNA, simply speaking, DNA sequencing is to deduce the order of A, T, C and G in a DNA molecule... (Read more)

Engineering cells

After we have grown genes to a necessarily large quantity, we insert the genes into plasmid vectors, which are circular DNA molecules used to transfer to cells our foreign genes, using a chemical reaction called ligation which ‘glues’ two DNA molecules at their ends to make them into one. After this, we then transform... (Read more)

Expressing genes

In usual, the selection of the genes of interest for engineering the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacterium is determined by the following parts. These parts are with interesting properties that would allow cells to perform naturally unattainable functions... (Read more)

With these above discussed procedures, the principles used and gene sequences designed to genetically engineer living organisms, commonly E. coli bateria cells, to perform biologically non-existing functions are finally possible. From here, we will investigate how we can propose some of these functions and also design DNA sequences to allow such functions to work, such as the topic we are going to discuss - genetic circuits.