The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.

Just as technicians can now assemble standardized, off-the-shelf electronic components to build computers, synthetic biologists foresee a day when engineers will assemble well-characterized biological components into robust host organisms to achieve specific functions, such as convert biomass into biofuels, or cheaply produce drugs to fight disease, or detect and destroy biochemical agents. The richness and versatility of biological systems make them ideally suited to solve such challenges. But despite great progress in engineering microorganisms, significant challenges persist and prevent engineers to easily and predictably reprogram existing systems, let alone build new enzymes, signal transduction pathways, genetic circuits, and eventually whole cells. SynBERC aims to develop the understanding and technological tools needed to design biological systems for pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, and other areas where the high costs and long development times of conventional biological approaches are prohibitive.

SynBERC is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. SynBERC is a program of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3).