Too much ownership: bioprospecting in the age of synthetic biology

Taking the example of Craig Venter’s marine bio-prospecting expedition, this article explores the effects that bioinformatics and sequencing technologies have had upon the process of bio-prospecting. What kind of an aggregate is a collection that spans evolutionary ecologies, database logics and programmable synthetic organisms? And by means of what displacements, translations and topologies are genetic collections ‘made up’ in the age of bioinformatics and synthetic biology?