Bottom-up synthetic biology: modular design for making artificial platelets.

Majumder, S and Liu, AP (2017) Bottom-up synthetic biology: modular design for making artificial platelets. Phys Biol, 15. 013001-.

Abstract

Engineering artificial cells to mimic one or multiple fundamental cell biological functions is an emerging area of synthetic biology. Reconstituting functional modules from biological components in vitro is a challenging yet an important essence of bottom-up synthetic biology. Here we describe the concept of building artificial platelets using bottom-up synthetic biology and the four functional modules that together could enable such an ambitious effort.