Narrator: This is Science Today. Synthetic biology is the manipulation of biology for a particular purpose, including producing bulk chemicals, drugs and most recently, biofuels. Jay Keasling, a professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says as novel as it sounds, the concept of synthetic biology is not new.

Keasling: If you go back to the foundations of genetic engineering, one of the thing that they wanted to be able to do with genetic engineering is to engineer plants to fix nitrogen. And if you think about that, that's very fundamental for the production of fuels. We need nitrogen-based fertilizers for most of the crops we raise, like corn.

Narrator: But nitrogen-based fuels are very energy intensive.

Keasling: It takes methane actually to produce ammonia that we use to fertilize crops. If we could engineer a plant to fix its own nitrogen, we wouldn't have to use all of that energy to make these ammonia fertilizers and that would save a huge amount of energy.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.