University of Northern Iowa
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 10th, 2009
We are pleased to announce a special opportunity to help build the community of biologists and engineers that iGEM represents. The Institute of Biological Engineering (IBE) is a young, dynamic professional organization that has embraced the emerging field of synthetic biology. We are a young organization in two ways: IBE is just 12 years old, [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 10th, 2009
The Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory established the world’s first Synthetic Biology Department, which seeks to understand and design biological systems and their components to address a host of problems that cannot be solved using naturally-occurring systems. Employing organisms and biologically inspired systems to solve real-world problems has enormous potential for human [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 10th, 2009
“Biology is going to be able to make the things that we want,” said Tom Knight, an MIT engineer and co-founder of iGEM. “And when that happens, the economics of production are going to change dramatically. It doesn’t take a billion-dollar [facility] to make stuff. It takes a hundred-dollar incubator.”
Genetic-Engineering Competitors Create Modular DNA Dev [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Dec 9th, 2008
Synthetic biologist Drew Endy discusses the exponential growth in the field of bioengineering. He discusses how only recently have scientists been able to synthesize strands of DNA as a computer engineer would write code.
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Posted in Synthetic Biology on Nov 11th, 2008
ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2008) — Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a “plug-and-play” synthetic RNA device–a sort of eminently customizable biological computer–that is capable of taking in and responding to more than one biological or environmental signal at a time.
Engineers Build First-ever Multi-input ‘Plug-and-play’ Synthetic RNA Device
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Posted in Synthetic Biology on Oct 23rd, 2008
Many important chemical reactions are slow and unwieldy because no enzyme exists to prod them to greater efficiency. Designing new enzymes from scratch is of practical interest in biomedicine, biotechnology, environmental cleanup, and other industries. Precisely engineered enzymes, built to match the specific task at hand, could improve many processes in these fields by triggering, [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Oct 19th, 2008
Can we create new life out of our digital universe?†asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels†— biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Oct 19th, 2008
It’s just come to my attention that there will soon be a new scientific journal totally dedicated to this fascinating area of science engineering named accordingly Synthetic Biology. The new journal will be published by Wiley & Sons and has a respectable editorial board headed by Adam P. Arkin (Berkeley). The board includes well [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Oct 19th, 2008
Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at MIT who is cofounding a synthetic biology company called Ginkgo BioWorks, sees the transformative value of biohacking – the phrase used to describe doing to living organisms what computer hackers have long done with electronics. But he has reservations about putting such power into the hands of amateurs.”I [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Apr 26th, 2008
Let’s suppose that, knowing nothing about cars, you wanted to learn how they worked. You happen to have a friend who is an auto mechanic, so you ask him to explain cars to you: How do they start? How does burning gasoline make the engine go? How does the force generated by the engine get [...]
