Team:Hong Kong HKUST/hp/article

From 2013.igem.org

Revision as of 14:01, 24 September 2013

Synthetic biology is a relatively new and rapidly growing research field that is considered to hold significant technological potential. As it involves the design and production of biological systems not present in the natural world, synthetic biology resembles an engineering application of biological sciences. Development up to now has mostly been centered in the West, in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, with Japan being East Asia’s one of the early adopters.In more recent years, other East Asian countries have begun to participate on the international synthetic biology stage. But in comparison to western countries, synthetic biology in East Asian countries is still in its infancy. The result is a disparity in information available to the public about synthetic biology developments in these respective regions.

In the interests of amending this situation, we present this document as a reference for progress in synthetic biology in the four East Asian countries/regions and one South East Asian country: Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. It includes investigations into research achievements, public perception, regulations and funding that we conducted using local online search engines and our native languages that will hopefully provide with the inside story.

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) iGEM 2013 team has built a fatty acid inducible system that enable inducible glyoxylate shunt to serve as an artificial futile cycle in human liver cells to ultimately increase energy expenditure responding to high circulating fatty acid levels. This can help obesity patients increase expenditure of calories and alleviate health complications such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. To express this futile cycle, genes necessary for the inducible glyoxylate shunt need to be introduced into a human body. Because introducing genes into the human body is currently not a common therapeutic method, we thought it would be necessary to research on the details of how our project could be actually applied. Even though the application of our project may not occur in the near future, we thought it was necessary to evaluate our project’s application as a potential biotechnology product. We have investigated a possible method that is under serious research in the science community: gene therapy. In this article, we will introduce the approach in more detail; examine the bio-safety and bio-ethical issues; and lastly inspect if our project could be applied using this method.