University of Northern Iowa
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 [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Mar 19th, 2008
Bio::Blogs is a monthly bioinformatic-related blog journal. This issue, number 19, is hosted here at O’Really? and focuses on the the fascinating relationship between Biology and Engineering. Below, for your reading pleasure, is a brief roundup of blog posts during February-ish 2008, and a few other related Bioengineering resources. How much is Biology [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Mar 7th, 2008
A video of Drew Endy’s presentation from the 24th Chaos Communication Congress can be found here. It discusses genetic code in terms of Accelerating Returns, developing a high-level programming language, and the worldwide collective development of open-source objects. He proposes reprogramming bacterial DNA as one form of nano-engineering. Bio-safety and the future of bio-hacking communities [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Feb 23rd, 2008
The third part of the Edge series “Life: What a concept!” is now online. This one is a talk with Drew Endy, a bioengineer at MIT. Despite existing for 30 years, we still haven’t realized much of the promise of biotechnology and Endy believes this is because we haven’t invested enough in making [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Feb 23rd, 2008
How to make biology easy to engineer and what are the consequences of success? Drew Endy exposes his views on these key issues in the field of synthetic biology in a video released in the last issue of EDGE.
As a teaser, here are a few quotes from this interview, summarizing in a nutshell his opinion [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Feb 15th, 2008
An MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can give scientists an alternative way to look at the inner workings of a complicated biological system–such as a pathway in [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Feb 7th, 2008
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center have developed new “fluorogen activating proteins” (FAPs) that will become a key component of novel molecular biosensor technology being created at Carnegie Mellon. The FAPs, which can be used to monitor biological activities of individual proteins and other biomolecules within living cells in real time, [...]
Posted in Plant Biotechnology, Synthetic Biology on Jan 27th, 2008
A few weeks ago, Jason Kelly explained in his post how Itaya and colleagues (2007) assembled the complete 135 kb rice chloroplast circular genome starting from a collection of 5-6 kb fragments and using sequential in vivo homologous recombination in Bacillus subtilis. Now, Hamilton Smith, Craig Venter and colleagues have achieved the assembly of a [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 9th, 2008
In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.To some this may be troubling, but part of the [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 2nd, 2008
A paradigm shift is underway within the methodology of heterologous protein expression. Specifically, researchers are moving away from conventional techniques of cloning genes from cDNA libraries and moving toward the rational design and de novo synthesis of entire protein-coding sequences from pre-annealed oligonucleotides (Libertini and Di Donato, 1992; Gustafsson et al, 2004). It was the [...]