Welcome to this final module of the Introduction to Synthetic Biology. In the previous modules, you would have seen a lot of the technological developments that drive the rapid progression through the design, build and test cycle for the engineering of improved biological systems. We will have heard some of the implications of this development for responsible research and innovation. In the next few slides, I want to introduce some of the general trends that emerge from looking at this development. One major trend is that synthetic biology is becoming easier and cheaper very rapidly. And that makes the technologies available to ever increasing ranges of applications and makes them available to communities that previously couldn't realistically do genetic manipulation. One example of that development is the iGEM competition. A student competition and international meeting of students working on synthetic biology every summer and competing on the engineering of genetically modified machines. Participants come from all over the world and they meet in the autumn to compare their results. While this is a student project, It is by no means lacking in science. The projects that students are doing in the iGEM competition are demonstrations of the enormous potential of synthetic biology, extremely creative applications of the new technologies and illustration of how the methods for genetically engineering microbes are becoming more accessible and easy to use. The projects can range from playful things like the generation of bacteria, that smell of bananas, but they can also be very applied like the production of blood substitutes in E.coli. Some of them are rather technology driven, for instance, the production of spider silk in bacteria, or they aim for environmental improvement, like say, E.coli project that produces a palm oil substitute in E.coli to protect rain forests in developing countries and the diverse species. Other examples like the cell-bots and the taxicoli are engineering microbes to deliver drugs in the human body, targeting the disease tissue very specifically. And there are even developments trying to use genetic engineering in eukaryotes, for instance in frogs. Although that project was more philosophy-driven than technology-driven at that point. One of the major features of the iGEM competition is that it emphasizes the reusability of the building blocks created by synthetic pathways. Every student team in the end of their project delivers the bio bricks that they have produced to a central repository where they can later be reused by next year's teams. And that leads to the development of a huge resource of building blocks for all kinds of applications. And here on this slide, a few examples are shown ranging from the building blocks for individual biosynthetic pathways down to therapeutic kits for assembling artificial viruses. It also illustrates the simplicity of the technology by now. The 3A assembly kit, for instance, makes synthetic biology available to high school students. Another major trend is that synthetic biology is very rapidly moving towards real life industrial applications. The intention here is to develop a biology based alternative to the entire petrochemical industry starting from cheap biomass feedstocks, like wood chips or straw, one moves to increasing the sophisticated chemicals in the end really having a supply chain for chemicals in all possible imaginable applications. Obviously all of this means that synthetic biology is emerging as a disruptive technology that presents a vast range of new opportunities. But also together with that vast range of new challenges, and because of that there is an entire parallel industry creating reports on the implications synthetic biology will have in all areas of society. Ethical implications, industrial applications, national academies of sciences, various government agencies, non-governmental organizationz, they all are contributing to this very lively debate. I think, synthetic biology is probably the only area of the life sciences where the number of policy reports and review papers is larger than the number of the original science publications. The societal debate, of course, uses different metaphors for the extreme genetic engineering that synthetic biology tries to achieve. It's not so much focusing on the engineering aspects as the LEGO brick metaphor or the electronic circuit metaphor. Instead, the debate focuses on metaphors like synthetic biologists are playing God; they are interfering with nature. Or synthetic biologists are Dr. Frankensteins that are producing monster cells with potential risks for society. All of this is part of a very important debate that needs to be had for any kind of emerging new technology. And I hope that the modules in this series have provided you with scientific background to make useful and informed reasonable contribution to the this kind of discourse.