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Signaling pathways lie at the heart of cellular responses to environmental cues. The ability to reconstruct specific signaling modules ex vivo allows us to study their inherent properties in an isolated environment, which in turn enables us to elucidate fundamental design principles for such motifs. This synthetic biology approach for analyzing natural, well-defined signaling modules will help to...
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Depletion of oil reserves and the associated effects on climate change have prompted a re-examination of the use of plant biomass as a sustainable source of organic carbon for the large-scale production of chemicals and materials. While initial emphasis has been placed on biofuel production from edible plant sugars, the drive to reduce the competition between crop usage for food and non-food...
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By Mark Brown, Wired UK
After 20 years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years.
Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than 200 lakes that are hidden 4 km beneath the ice. Some of the lakes formed when the continent was much warmer and still connected...
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Attention student designers: The 2012 James Dyson Award is now open for entry, seeking solutions from design or engineering students from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK and the US.
If you students were to enter most world-class design competitions, you'd undoubtedly...
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"North America is at an inflection point in managing organic materials. Just as paper, metal and plastics were the darlings of the recycling industry a couple decades ago, our society is defining a new relationship with organic materials: one that harnesses the full carbon, energy and nutrient potential of organics. In order to help shape that new relationship, industry leaders are cultivating...
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The promises of modern biotechnology hinge upon the hope that we can understand microscopic cellular complexity and in doing so create novel function. In this regard, the fields of systems and synthetic biology are important for accelerating both our understanding of biological systems and our ability to quantitatively engineer cells. At the nexus of these two fields is a unique synergy that can...
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KLARI REIS SCI ART BY ROBERT T. GONZALEZ
Psychedelic Petri dishes turn lab work into a freakout session Can you guess the subject of this photograph? It's a bloodshot alien eyeball! Just kidding, although all that red totally resembles vasculature don't you think?
Don't worry, the real answer is just as awesome: believe it or not, this is actually a Petri dish, created by artist Klari...
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The United States has long been recognized as one of the most scientifically productive countries on Earth. But when you're discussing progress, where you've been is not nearly as important as
a) where you are today, and b) where you stand to go from there
What this presentation from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes abundantly clear is that America's scientific future is shaping up...
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It looks like a good start for 2012 with several companies closing some good funding this month.
New Zealand-based LanzaTech announced this week that it has bagged a total of US $55.8m in its series C round of financing led by the Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund. New investors include PETRONAS Technology Ventures Sdn Bhd and Dialog Group. Existing investors such as Khosla Ventures, Qiming...
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Synthetic biosystems for the production of high-value plant metabolites.: "Publication Date: 2011 Dec 29 PMID: 22209518 Authors: Facchini, P. J. - Bohlmann, J. - Covello, P. S. - De Luca, V. - Mahadevan, R. - Page, J. E. - Ro, D. K. - Sensen, C. W. - Storms, R. - Martin, V. J. Journal: Trends Biotechnol Plants display an immense diversity of specialized metabolites, many of which have been...
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Production of amorphadiene in yeast, and its conversion to dihydroartemisinic acid, precursor to the antimalarial agent artemisinin [Applied Biological Sciences]: "Malaria, caused by Plasmodium sp, results in almost one million deaths and over 200 million new infections annually. The World Health Organization has recommended that artemisinin-based combination therapies be used for treatment of...
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A transcription activator-like effector toolbox for genome engineering: "
A transcription activator-like effector toolbox for genome engineering
Nature Protocols 7, 171 (2012). doi:10.1038/nprot.2011.431
Authors: Neville E Sanjana, Le Cong, Yang Zhou, Margaret M Cunniff, Guoping Feng & Feng Zhang
Transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs) are a class of naturally occurring...
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Synthetic biological approaches to natural product biosynthesis.: "Publication Date: 2012 Jan 3 PMID: 22221832 Authors: Winter, J. M. - Tang, Y. Journal: Curr Opin Biotechnol Small molecules produced in Nature possess exquisite chemical diversity and continue to be an inspiration for the development of new therapeutic agents. In their host organisms, natural products are assembled and modified...
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Expanding the synthetic biology toolbox: engineering orthogonal regulators of gene expression.: "Publication Date: 2012 Jan 9 PMID: 22237017 Authors: Rao, C. V. Journal: Curr Opin Biotechnol Despite substantial progress in synthetic biology, we still lack the ability to engineer anything as complex as Nature has. One of the many reasons is that we lack the requisite tools for independently...
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The best board games also teach important life skills. Scrabble improves spelling. Monopoly imparts valuable business strategies. And now Strain can make you a genetic engineer on par with Dr. Moreau. More »
Bio-Engineering Board Game Sounds Like More Fun Than Running a Monopoly [Games]: "
(Via Gizmodo.)
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Scientists are constantly looking for new and better ways of seeing through biological tissue, in order to see cells within it that have been marked with dyes, proteins or other substances. While recent research has involved using marking materials such as carbon nanotubes and firefly protein, scientists from Japan’s RIKEN Brain Science Institute have taken a different approach – they’ve...
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the observation tower and city museum are based on structural methods from cells and plant-life to create a self-sufficient zone in taiwan.
read more"
soma: multiple natures - fibrous tower for taiwan tower competition
(Via Designboom - Weblog.)
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"MIT has long offered thousands of undergrad and graduate level course materials for free online. This month, they announced plans to significantly update and expand that effort, creating an open-source education system called MITx that will basically allow anyone to virtually take an MIT class, participate in laboratories, and get individual assessment on whether or not they've learned the...
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One Laptop Per Child unveiled its XO 3.0 tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show Sunday, designed to bring the tablet experience to developing countries. The tablet sports impressive specs given its targeted price point ($100, but only sold in bulk to countries) and OLPC has made sure the device has a variety of charging methods at its disposal.
The XO tablet can run Android or its own Sugar...
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In a lab at the University of Wyoming, some silkworms are spinning cocoons of silk, just as every silkworm has done for millions of years. But these insects are special. They have been genetically engineered to spin a hybrid material that’s partly their own silk, and partly that of a spider. With spider DNA at their disposal, they can weave fibres that are unusually strong and tough. It’s the...
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