| Chemistry is a broadly powerful discipline in contemporary science because it has the ability to create new forms of the matter that it studies. By doing so, chemistry can test models that connect molecular structure to behavior without having to rely on what nature has provided. This creation, known as "synthesis," began to be applied to living systems in the 1980s as recombinant DNA technologies allowed biologists to deliberately change the molecular structure of the microbes that they studied, and automated chemical synthesis of DNA became widely available to support these activities. The impact of the information that has emerged has made biologists aware of a truism that has long been known in chemistry: synthesis drives discovery and understanding in ways that analysis cannot. Synthetic biology is now setting an ambitious goal: to recreate in artificial systems the emergent properties found in natural biology. By doing so, it is advancing our understanding of the molecular basis of genetics in ways that analysis alone cannot. Synthetic biology is now set to take the next step, to create artificial Darwinian systems by direct construction.;As the next step in developing artificial Darwinian systems, artificial deoxyribonucleic acid comprising three orthogonal base pairs have been prepared. These molecules were developed into a genetic system able to direct the synthesis of its own replication. The replication of these molecules has the possibility of error, with the errors themselves being heritable, thus approaching the first artificial chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.;The artificial genetic systems were further developed by linking the information in the molecules, the genotype, with an observed property, the phenotype. Developing this genotypic-phenotypic relationship, accomplished by placing the artificial genetic molecules under a selection pressure to act as a catalyst, allowed for the study of Darwinian processes occurring in artificial systems.;Further, the synthesis of the artificial genetic systems yielded understanding about the genetic system found in nature, including the chemical structure of DNA, and interactions between DNA and the enzymes responsible for its replication. |
