Newsflash:

The economic and social life of synthetic biology

Monday, 21 March 2011 13:56

Symposium to be held at the Royal Society and The Royal Academy of Engineering, 13-14 April 2011

You are invited to attend a symposium at the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering in London on 13-14 April 2011 to discuss the economic and social life of synthetic biology. This event is jointly hosted by the UK’s academies of science and engineering, along with the USA National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. For the first time, the expertise and networks of these international academies will be brought together, producing a unique opportunity for researchers, policy makers and firms interested in this emerging field.

The first in a series of three symposia, each held in a different country, this symposium will explore the potential for synthetic biology research to lead to novel tools and technology, as well as the challenges provoked by these innovations. The Chinese and American symposia will follow: in Shanghai in the Autumn, articulating the technical challenges faced by researchers; and in Washington in early 2011, looking towards the next generation of technologies and the research infrastructure needed to cope with them.

Further details, including how to register, are in the linked flyer and draft programme. Please feel free to forward to colleagues.

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...