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Synthetic biologists come in two broad classes. One uses unnatural molecules to reproduce emergent behaviours from natural biology, with the goal of creating artificial life. The other seeks interchangeable parts from natural biology to assemble into systems that function unnaturally.
More recently, an engineering community has given further meaning to the title. This community seeks to extract from living systems interchangeable parts that might be tested, validated as construction units, and reassembled to create devices that might (or might not) have analogues in living systems. The parts come from natural living systems (that is, they are biological); their assembly is, however, unnatural. Therefore, one engineering goal might be to assemble biological components (such as proteins that bind DNA and the DNA sequences that they bind) to create, for example, outputs analogous to those of a computer.

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