Optogenetic Hack Advances Synthetic Morphogenesis

A living organism, says the synthetic biologist, is the output generated by a tangle of interconnected subprograms. Naturally, the synthetic biologist wants to disentangle these programs and—to the extent possible—modularize them, so that they may be plucked from their ordinary, living contexts and put to work, harnessed for applications such as regenerative medicine. Adding to the synthetic biologist’s collection of parts, scientists based at the European Molecular Biology Lab