Newsflash:

Royal Society: Future Technologies

Monday, 28 June 2010 12:58

In the past 25 years our use of technology has increased at an unprecedented rate, affecting our way of life and how we function in society. What's next? Are we set to see more inventions that change the image of technology and the culture we live in? How will these developments affect and influence the future of society? Our expert panel gives their views and insights into their own use of technology and their hopes for the future. The panel included:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee FRS , inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Stephen Fry, writer, broadcaster and technophile
Professor Dame Wendy Hall FRS , leading computer scientist at University of Southampton
Dr Jim Haseloff, synthetic biologist from University of Cambridge
Bill Thompson, technology critic and commentator on digital culture.
Watch the webcast
http://seefurtherfestival.org/news/photographs-and-webcast-future-technologies

Synthetic Biology

synbio.org.uk

SynBio news

Classifying DNA assembly protocols for devising cellular architectures.

Biotechnol Adv. 2011 Jan-Feb;29(1):156-63 Authors: Wang X, Sa N, Tian PF, Tan TW DNA assembly is one of the most fundamental techniques in synthetic biology. Efficient methods can turn traditional DNA cloning into time-saving and higher efficiency practice, which is a foundation to accomplish the dreams of synthetic biologists for devising cellular architectures, reprogramming cellular behaviors, or creating synthetic cells. In this review, typical strategies of DNA assembly are discussed with special emphasis on the assembly of long and multiple DNA fragments into intact plasmids or assembled...

Supporting the synthetic revolution

Nature Reviews Microbiology 9, 2 (2011). doi:10.1038/nrmicro2498 Recommendations on the regulation of synthetic biology in the United States provide important lessons on how to foster a nascent field of research while promoting public awareness and support. (Via Nature Reviews Microbiology.)

Model Annotation for Synthetic Biology: Automating Model to Nucleotide Sequence Conversion.

Bioinformatics. 2011 Feb 4; Authors: Misirli G, Hallinan JS, Yu T, Lawson JR, Wimalaratne SM, Cooling MT, Wipat A MOTIVATION: The need for the automated computational design of genetic circuits is becoming increasingly apparent with the advent of ever more complex and ambitious synthetic biology projects. Currently, most circuits are designed through the assembly of models of individual parts such as promoters, ribosome binding sites and coding sequences. These low level models are combined to produce a dynamic model of a larger device that exhibits a desired behaviour. The larger model then acts...

Exploiting plug-and-play synthetic biology for drug discovery and production in microorganisms.

Nat Rev Microbiol. 2011 Feb;9(2):131-7 Authors: Medema MH, Breitling R, Bovenberg R, Takano E One of the most promising applications of synthetic biology is the biosynthesis of new drugs from secondary metabolites. Here, we survey a wide range of strategies that control the activity of biosynthetic modules in the cell in space and time, and illustrate how these strategies can be used to design efficient cellular synthetic production systems. Re-engineered versions of secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways identified from any genomic sequence can then be inserted into these systems in a plug-and-play...

Opportunities for yeast metabolic engineering: Lessons from synthetic biology.

Biotechnol J. 2011 Feb 16; Authors: Krivoruchko A, Siewers V, Nielsen J Constant progress in genetic engineering has given rise to a number of promising areas of research that facilitated the expansion of industrial biotechnology. The field of metabolic engineering, which utilizes genetic tools to manipulate microbial metabolism to enhance the production of compounds of interest, has had a particularly strong impact by providing new platforms for chemical production. Recent developments in synthetic biology promise to expand the metabolic engineering toolbox further by creating novel biological...

Synthetic Toxicology: Where engineering meets biology and toxicology.

Toxicol Sci. 2010 Nov 10; Authors: Schmidt M, Pei L This article examines the implications of synthetic biology (SB) for toxicological sciences. Starting with a working definition of SB, we describe its current subfields, namely DNA synthesis, the engineering of DNA-based biological circuits, minimal genome research, attempts to construct protocells and synthetic cells, and efforts to diversify the biochemistry of life through xenobiology. Based on the most important techniques, tools and expected applications in SB, we describe the ramifications of SB for toxicology under the label of synthetic...

Contrasts: Craig Venter and NSABB on synthetic biology

Two rather contrasting videos on synthetic biology this month. In the first videocast, released by TED, Craig Venter exposes his grand vision of synthetic genomics. He insists on the notion of 'combinatorial genomics', that will combine the power of large scale DNA synthesis ('robots that can make a million chromosomes a day') with a database of 20 million genes, 'the design components of the future'. This approach, a pragmatic mixture of rational function-oriented...

Model Annotation for Synthetic Biology: Automating Model to Nucleotide Sequence Conversion.

Model Annotation for Synthetic Biology: Automating Model to Nucleotide Sequence Conversion.: Bioinformatics. 2011 Feb 4; Authors: Misirli G, Hallinan JS, Yu T, Lawson JR, Wimalaratne SM, Cooling MT, Wipat A MOTIVATION: The need for the automated computational design of genetic circuits is becoming increasingly apparent with the advent of ever more complex and ambitious synthetic biology projects. Currently, most circuits are designed through the...