Re: [DIYbio] Now I need to do something practically!

Just like writing a "Hello World" program could be called "editing" rather than "software engineering"? I'd say cloning is one of the tools to learn to do synthetic biology. Now, put a different promoter in front of that GFP gene, few people will complain about calling that synthetic biology...

Most of the cost of running an IGEM team typically goes towards student stipends. See this calculation from 2008, for example. IGEM teams also receive hundreds of parts from previous year's competitions on a couple of 384 well plates, and there's enough parts there that teams can do incredibly interesting projects without doing any additional gene synthesis.

Getting access to those IGEM biobrick distribution plates as an unaffiliated amateur may be tricky, but you may be able to get some parts from a friend at a university. After all, IGEM has been sending out hundreds of these kits all over the world now. You can also get some reasonably priced plasmids from Addgene or other sources (again - may need to order through a friend at a university) and reengineer those to do something different. You can also clone genes directly out of the original organisms (e.g. Lux operon out of Vibrio), and do interesting things with those. All those options can be significantly cheaper than synthesizing genes from scratch.

Of course, there are definitely some synthetic biology projects that fall into the Big Science category, like re-engineering entire genomes like Craig Venter is doing. But there's plenty of smaller scale synthetic biology projects that are most definitely within range of "advanced amateur, or small-pocket professional".
 

Not when you're designing and implementing a novel genetic circuit from existing parts. Or doing combinatorial assembly of pathways from libraries of existing parts, like Amyris and JBEI are doing. Of course, "synthetic biology" is still a fairly new field, and some people will disagree on where the boundaries of the definition lie (or how to distinguish it from genetic engineering, which is another can of worms). For example, the whole purpose of the BioBricks foundation is to come up with a collection of well characterized, low side-effect parts that then can be reused in arbitrarily new combinations. If BioBricks are the equivalent of lego blocks then, to me, synthetic biology is much more about how to build something cool with legos, rather than how to make your own lego blocks from scratch.
 
Patrik