A Living Foundry for Synthetic Biological Materials: A Synthetic Biology Roadmap to New Advanced Materials

Society is on the cusp of harnessing recent advances in synthetic biology to discover new bio-based products and routes to their affordable and sustainable manufacture. This is no more evident than in the discovery and manufacture of Synthetic Biological Materials, where synthetic biology has the capacity to usher in a new Materials from Biology era that will revolutionise the discovery and manufacture of innovative Synthetic Biological Materials. These will encompass novel, smart, functionalised and hybrid materials for diverse applications whose discovery and routes to bio-production will be stimulated by the fusion of new technologies positioned across physical, digital and biological spheres.

This article, which developed from an international workshop held in Manchester, United Kingdom, in 2017 [1], sets out to identify opportunities in the new Materials from Biology era. It considers requirements, early understanding and foresight of the challenges faced in delivering a Discovery to Manufacturing Pipeline for Synthetic Biological Materials using synthetic biology approaches. This challenge spans the complete production cycle from intelligent and predictive design, fabrication, evaluation and production of Synthetic Biological Materials to new ways of bringing these products to market. Pathway opportunities are identified that will help foster expertise sharing and infrastructure development to accelerate the delivery of a new generation of Synthetic Biological Materials and the leveraging of existing investments in synthetic biology and advanced materials research to achieve this goal.