Tom Knight in the following video draws parallels between people that are looking for genes in nature (existing biological organisms) and the synthetic biology community (creating new biological organisms).
The approaches these two communities are using seem to be working on the same problem, but are burning opposite ends of the complexity candle (if you will). It is true that the synthetic biology group is currently using bacterial hosts, but, there are also some attempts at using mammalian hosts.
Another analogy that I'll draw is between the current genetic visualization tools used to understand where specific genes occur within a given chromosome and software disassemblers such as IDA Pro. Disassemblers can help software developers understand how specific machine instructions get an entire software program to do its thing.
With this background, here are a few more explicit questions:
1. How much specie cross over is there between small sections of genetic material? I've heard that the same gene in one organism can play a very similar if not the same role in a dramatically different organism.
2. If there is cross over, is anyone leveraging it to better understand in vivo organisms.
3. Would there be an opportunity understand/extend existing genetic visualization tools to see how small sections of genetic material may be interpreted to create a larger block of behavior.
Perhaps I don't understand your question, rather than feedback I see synthetic biology as an emergence from people studying the wild. For instance, the work of Adam Arkin, Eric Olson, and countless others is geared towards observing natural systems, describing them as circuits, and trying to understand them as circuits. There was even a little paper in Science out of Rick Young's lab (not usually thought of as a systems biologist) about 10 years ago describing the basic regulatory circuits in yeast, composed of the very elements one might find at openwetware.org. So I guess I would say there is very much active feedback between the groups. (?) (if that's what you mean).
Ben, if what you mean is "are people that study biology in the wild starting to use things like the bio bricks repository to better understand how things work or even as tools?" than I think for the health/disease directed human focused research the answer is no. The most used artificial model in that type of research is still the knockout mouse. In fact knockout or knockdown models received a big boost from the development siRNA technology. Constructs are being used as well, especially in cell culture, where people use new combinations of regulatory sequences, coding sequences and reporting sequences, but in my experience also these constructs do not really use libraries developed by synthetic biologists, not even for the conceptualization.
Probably the reason lays in the big distance between the fields. As far as I know these synthetic biology repositories are based on yeast and microbe sequences and thus not immediately useful in human and rodent cell lines. Even the gene circuits themselves (which are more like electronic constructs) cannot easily be transferred to these species since many regulatory mechanisms are really different. In yeast and microbial research itself the situation might be different. I am not sure about that In any case that is where you would expect this to happen first.
Given the extension of your question, I'd offer the following: (1) There is a lot of crossover in genetic material between organisms. A popular example is that GAL4 transcription factor in yeast. Yeast are single cell organisms, but GAL4 can work to activate gene expression in flies, fish, and mammalian cells. There a large fraction of genes which are "conserved" to various extents across organisms, and many function at some level, when placed into another organism. Another way to view this might be chromosome painting. Use cat DNA to highlight similar sequences on human DNA and you get a very pretty picture (a huge amount of similarity). (2) Yes, the crossover is being used to better understand the working of all organisms. This is the basis of "model organism research". This is why you can study cancer using yeast, why you can study alcoholism or Parkinsons disease using fruitflies. Many of the basic mechanisms of cell division are preserved between yeast and mammals - but yeast are far easier to study. The crossover is also used to study new organisms, aka comparative genomics. If you sequence a new organism, the first way to figure anything out about it is to BLAST against all other organisms - the shared parts often have the same functions between the two. (3) This is the interesting, and hardest part of your question: tools for visualizing larger structure from the smaller parts. Currently it's a tough problem to solve because there are too many variables, and the small parts can have different behaviors depending on context and other things. Some companies (e.g. maxygen) make a living off this.
Yes, It is possible that the same gene in one organism can play a very similar if not the same role in a different organism. But before synthesizing that particular gene, there should Codon Optimization - It means to make optimized or make changes in target accordingly where you are going to insert it. e.g. If a codon code for one amino acid in mouse, the same codon might code for a different amino acid in another organism (Yeast). So, If you are going to express that mouse gene in yeast. you need to optimize that codon accordingly for yeast. Otherwise, It may not or low expressed in the target cell.
Voted down because the question is quite unclear, in addition it rather asking for a general opinion on these fields of research.