The engineering of cells and the synthesis of complex biologically-inspired systems with functions that do not exist in nature were the main themes at the Synthetic Biology Workshop in Groningen, organized by Bert Poolman from November 6-8, 2008. A series of very inspiring lectures were given by renowned scientists from all over the world.  The meeting started with two tutorials, one by Drew Endy from Stanford University who presented the 'Bio-bricks' concept and introduced basic principles for engineering of cellular systems. The second tutorial was given by Hagan Bayley from Oxford who presented the bottom-up construction of protocells from oil-lipid-water mixtures and the engineering of membrane pores with sophisticated gating and specificity functions. Membrane bilayers, formed at the droplet interface and equipped with such engineered pores, yielded elegant bio-electronic devices. 

 
The amazing possibilities of DNA as construction material and state-of-the-art methods to redesign the specificity and the catalytic properties of enzymes were presented in a number of lectures. Possibly the most challenging approach is to produce completely new and unnatural (polymeric) molecules with functions that the 'old enzymes' may never be able to learn, but the computational design of such enzymes is still challenging. Major advances in the incorporation of unnatural amino acids in proteins and the introduction of modified sugars in surface-exposed proteins were reported at the workshop. In the strategy outlined by Jason Chin, cells were equipped with two parallel protein synthesis machineries, one for housing keeping functions, the other for the synthesis of unnatural proteins. 

In several lectures, it became clear that chemists and physicists have discovered biology and have developed novel analysis methods to measure enzymes and motor proteins down to the single-molecule level, to probe new functions (e.g. temperature sensing) and to bring about technological advances (micro-fluidic devices) for analyzing complex reaction networks. The large scale remodeling of cells to create new applications still uses clever selection schemes ('directed evolution'), but more and more engineering strategies guided by systems knowledge ('omics' data) are implemented.