According to the report, Europe government funding for synthetic biology outpaced US for the first three years tracked – from 2005 to 2007 – but was then suddenly overtaken as US projects attracted a massive increase in money.

The 2008 spikes follow a period when a number of projects attracted public attention. The J Craig Venter Institute demonstrated that it was possible to transplant a genome from one related species of bacteria cell to another; the team at UC Berkeley cut a deal to deliver the fruits of its artemisinin-synthesis project to Sanofi-Aventis in exchange for an agreement for the antimalarial to be manufactured and sold at near cost; and a crop of biofuel specialists popped up describing how they would transform bacteria and algae to make alternatives to diesel and petroleum.

Some of the spike may also be due to a recategorisation of projects. Synthetic biology has a blurred boundary so it’s not difficult to rework project proposals and grants to accommodate it rather than older definitions such as genetic modification.

For example, since 2006, the US Department of Energy alone has spent more than $700m on synthetic-biology research. The report points out: “Sources with the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) suggested the entire budgets of the Genomic Sciences Program and the Joint Genome Institute could be classified as synthetic-biology research.”

However, the report calculates that total US spending to date is lower, at $430m by assuming a more conservative level of funding from the DoE than the one proposed by the government agency: “We…cut its overall numbers in half.”

Medical and agriculture funding in the US lags biofuel work by a long way. The National Institute of Health has made $48m in awards since 2005 and the Department of Agriculture less than $3m. It was not clear how much the Department of Homeland Security and DARPA have spent. DARPA has only revealed a figure of $20m as a line item in its report for fiscal 2011.

Where funding for European funding falls is less clear as it is far more fragmented. But the project has said it wants to put together more detailed information as it continues to look at this area.

One of the problems facing synthetic biology is that no-one is really quite sure which IP laws will affect it the most. It has the characteristics of software in some respects - although I believe some of these comparisons are overplayed and run the risk of misleading people as to how synthetic organisms will be designed - and patentable hardware in others.

US IP law may not even have the right infrastructure to deal with synthetic biology. Rick Johnson, who heads up an OECD group on synthetic biology, and who has called the field “an IP law professor’s dream final examination problem”, has argued that lawyers in this field should take a closer look at design rights, which are used in Europe and Asia but hardly at all in the US, as a means of protecting synthetic-biology inventions without the encumbrance that often goes with patents in biotechnology.

Boyle warns:

“Some of the patents being filed are astoundingly basic, the equivalent of patenting Boolean algebra right at the birth of computer science. With courts now reconsidering both business method and perhaps software patents, and patents over human genes, the future is an uncertain one.”

In contrast to iGEM, which has no restrictions on entries other than they should use synthetic biology techniques and deliver any newly created genes to the BioBrick Registry, the GenoCon competition has a definite objective. For the one that has just launched, the aim is to transform thale cress (good old Arabidopsis thaliana) so that it digests the pollutant formaldehyde.

Masayuki Yamamura told Nature industrial groups don’t want to get involved with the BioBrick Registry because of the registry’s open-access provisions, which prevents patents being filed on genes that go into it. Participants in GenoCon will be able to keep sequences they use secret.

The paper looks at the complexity of drug-target interactions and how a network-based approach, coupled with synthetically assembled combinations of genes introduced into bacteria using phages, could be used to probe how the cellular network behaves when hit by drugs and combinations of them.

From Lab Rat:

“By using synthetic genes to disrupt or alter the proposed antibiotic network novel drug targets could be discovered. If turned into a high-throughput system this would be far more useful than the current screening system which tests for a potential drugs interaction with a target, rather than the ability of this interaction to lead to cell death.”

The added genes might themselves form part of a longer-lasting antibiotic (or a family of them), Lab Rat concludes:

“Using combinations of drugs at lower concentrations, or aiding antibiotics by introducing them along with synthetic genes in bacteriophages allows an increased shelf-life of the drugs that we currently possess as well as providing potential systems to aid the discovery of new antibiotics.”

“The burgeoning field of synthetic biology is filled with opportunities where many of Life Technologies’ genomic and sequencing products already play lead roles,” said Gregory Lucier, chairman and CEO of Life Technologies in a statement. “Just as Life Technologies is a pioneer in genetic sequencing, cloning and regenerative medicine, we will be able to directly participate and lead in synthetic biology by offering the tools our customers need to accelerate discoveries in this emerging field.”

Obama wants the report in six months and to “study the implications of this scientific milestone, as well as other advances that may lie ahead in this field of research”.

I wonder if they are going to point that this kind of thing has been going on for a while and that, although a total reboot is now possible, it’s unlikely to be the way that synthetic biology is done for a good while.

A good proportion of bacterial genome, particularly a small one like Mycoplasma genitalium, which provided the template for the original “synthetic genome”, is made up of essential genes - DNA that codes for proteins and segments of RNA needed to keep the cellular machinery running. Things like ribosomes have stayed more or less unchanged for millions of years because they are central to Earth’s lifeforms.

There is a chance that sooner or later, someone will have a go at redesigning these enzymes to see if there are better alternatives. But, given the current state of understanding of biology, it’s not going to be tomorrow. So, for any practical synthetic biology, you are better off letting the existing biological infrastructure get on with doing its thing and work on ways to insert and delete genes at will.

That’s not to say it’s not worth finding out if it’s possible to create a functional genome from a code. Creating entire genomes from scratch sounds like a big project and it is, but it’s eventual value compared with techniques that rely on the existing cellular machinery are probably to going to have more use.

A joke cracked at the SB4.0 conference about DNA synthesis and whether more should be spent on it to get much longer sequences cheaply was that “the only customer is Ham”, referring to Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, a leading member of the JCVI project. Everyone else was, more or less, happy to work with shorter, novel sequences bolted into an existing genetic chassis or to develop conceptually more laborious but cheaper, automatable ways to manipulate a genome.

Even a cursory look at the Science Express paper reveals the amount of work that went into the process of assembling the genome. DNA synthesis was comparatively straightforward and the team had already demonstrated that it was possible to reboot a cell with a foreign genome using existing, natural DNA, even though the process by which this rebooting happens still isn’t clear.

Even with all the care that went into synthesising and checking the DNA segments, errors crept in. And some were errors that biology has evolved out of the process. One killer error was a tiny change in one of the 11 segments of DNA that were ultimately stitched together to form a 1.1 million base-pair genome - the team had decided to move up from the smaller M genitalium because M mycoides was known to transplant successfully. One base pair went missing - and it happened to be in the DnaA gene, which is about as essential as it gets as it’s responsible for chromosome replication. No more generations of M jcvi without that.

That was fixed but other errors crept in, including a chunk of E coli DNA that turned up in the middle of the new genome. This was in a far less essential section of the genome as this was found in the successful rebooted cells. It may seem churlish to point this out but it’s worth recalling that many of the processes used to generate the complete synthetic genome relied on cloning techniques that have been around for a while and which themselves rely on natural processes. So, it’s not too surprising to find bits of the natural world turning. However, in an experiment that is meant to demonstrate how to take a code and write it into a cell, it’s far from desirable. Yet, in other techniques for genome editing, these processes would be far less destructive because they can be made work in concert rather than against the synthetic approach.

Chris Dwyer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said the technique could be used to build intelligent but tiny biosensors as well as nanoscale encryption keys.

Dwyer said the logic is form of diode-diode logic, one of the earliest approaches to digital computation used in electronics. Although it cannot form all the possible Boolean logic gates, it can be used to build simple computers from AND and OR gates. In the Duke University scheme, the diodes of an electronic circuit are replaced with chromophores - light-absorbing elements - attached to segments of DNA.

DNA-linked chromophores, particularly those that fluoresce, are used widely in biological experiments as they make it easy to identify the locations of genetic elements within a cell. Theodor Förster found in 1948 that chromophores can pass energy to other, different chromophores close by through a coupling process. Biologists often use this in Förster or fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) to show when molecules such as proteins are coupled together in complexes.

We found good indications that the UK is learning from past experiences in bioengineering when handling new emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology. The Government and Research Councils have recognised the value of synthetic biology early, and are providing funding. There is good activity in public engagement on synthetic biology. However we are concerned that while research is well funded there is not enough forethought about synthetic biology translation, for example developing DNA synthesis capability, which would provide the UK with an excellent opportunity to get ahead internationally. If this is not addressed, synthetic biology runs the risk of becoming yet another story of the UK failing to capitalise on a strong research base and falling behind internationally.

One of the problems pointed out to the committee during the evidence-gathering stage was that UK industry is not exactly well-positioned to benefit from synthetic biology. Although the pharmaceutical industry in the UK is comparatively strong, other sectors that could make use of materials produced using synthetic biology have been weakened by the flight of manufacturing from the country.

Ray Elliott, head of strategic projects at Syngenta, told the committee in January: “We have an interest in synthetic biology, but we are watching it. Most of it, at the moment, is happening in microbes but it could translate into plants. In terms of industrialisation, there are not many players in the UK who could take up synthetic-biology products.”

Although the original plan was to use the Magnotech system as a drug detector that could be used by police in the same way they would use a breathaliser, the emphasis has switched at Philips to speeding up the diagnosis of medical conditions, kicking off with heart attacks. Bedside staff can use instruments like that to work out quickly what treatment the patient needs.

“If possible, you want to stratify patients in the ambulance,” said Klunder. “In that way you can enable minimally invasive medicine.”

The reality today is that it takes a while to get the results back from a central laboratory. Although the actual tests are quick, the delay lies in the amount of time it takes to get the sample there and the result back, on top of the time that a sample may have to wait before being processed.

The answer is a bit unexpected, although there is a subtlety in the definition of the problem: it’s not the gene that results in the most protein, but the one best at “spreading its DNA around”.

Although proteins can make efficient catalysts, they have no clear way to reproduce. RNA is now a much more likely candidate as it can pass on genetic information and catalyse the reactions needed to do it. Although proteins are now responsible for most of the body’s catalysis, RNA ‘ribozymes’ are still in active and can be found at the heart of what are understood to be some of the most ancient cellular functions.

For a new breed of potatoes designed to only produce a starch suitable for treating paper as well as foodstuffs, a team at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany used good old-fashioned breeding to get the job done. Well almost. Good old-fashioned selective breeding with the foot hard on the accelerator pedal, using directed-evolution techniques to speed up the process of producing viable variants.

There's nothing particularly new about speeding up the process. Although protesters look upon direct genetic modification as 'unnatural', it's worth noting that plant breeders have used chemical and radiation treatment for some years to induce mutations that speed up the process of moving the candidate genomes into new territory. However, because these techniques do not carry the tag 'GM', nor do they carry the stigma.

"We are working here with natural principles. In nature, sunlight triggers changes in the genome, With chemistry, we accomplish the same thing - only faster," said Jost Muth of Fraunhofer IME in the release put together by the institute.

Normally, you have to wait after a burst of cross-breeding and mutation to see what crops develop. Not in this case. As soon as the seeds germinated, samples of the leaves were taken and their genomes analysed directly to see which mutants had picked up desired traits.

The researchers analysed 2748 seedlings to find a genome that had the genetic profile they were aiming for: the ability to produce amylopectin exclusively. Luckily the potato already has an amylopectin-production gene, which reduces the amount of mutation that the potato has to go through. However, the aim was to find a mutant that could shut off the production of sister starch amylose, which the 'Tilling' potato could. This avoids the need to purify the starch after harvesting and separation.

This autumn, the team grew about 100 tonnes of potatoes with the required genome, and without specialised GM trials. "Special measures aren't necessary, because the Tilling potatoes are totally normal breeds that contain no genetically modified material," said Muth.

The name Tilling is derived from the name the team gave to the process: targeting induced local lesions in genomes, a technique developed in the late 1990s in Seattle.

The executive takes the view that most of the existing work on synthetic biology is already covered by regulations on work with recombinant DNA, which seems fair enough. However, the response adds:

"Future work may involve the creation of artificial cells, which would not fall within the scope of existing legislation. Consequently, a minor amendment is being proposed to the definition of GM as part of the development of a single regulatory framework for work with human and animal pathogens and GMOs. This will enable the regulations to cover artificial cells, should the technology develop in that direction. This change will be consulted on prior to the implementation of the new regulatory system."

The amendment for the single regulatory framework, the executive adds, is likely to extend the definition of genetic modification to include the "introduction of genetic material into a cell artificially created for that purpose, where the cell is then capable of replication or of transferring genetic material".

I can see two potential issues with this. One is what happens if the definition of artificial cell extends to bioreactors? Will that make the operation of biobreweries more difficult? And, more fundamentally, what does 'genetic material' mean in this context? Early artificial cells will doubtless use standard DNA but does the definition of gene cover synthetic nucleic acid strands, such as peptide nucleic acid or alternative 'genetic' systems based on alternative nucleic acids, or molecules with a similar function?

One grant is to support a workshop that will host EU and US researchers looking at what synthetic biology can do, if anything, for sustainability. The University of Virginia will work with the Wilson Center on organising the workshop.

The second grant is to explore how online prediction markets - which have controversially been touted as ways to predict things from terrorist attacks to financial meltdowns - can be used to tap into the public mood on synthetic biology.

"Although online prediction markets have attracted significant interest from scholars and increasing application in corporate environments, little work has been done to apply these markets to critical issues in science and technology," said David Rejeski, director of the project at the Wilson Center in a statement.