SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute

Christina Agapakis explores the microbiological matrix that binds everything from pecorino to people http://oreil.ly/10Aa0o2

by
Robert Sanders

"Genetically engineered microbes could help make manned missions to Mars, the moon and other planets more practical, according to a new analysis by UC Berkeley and NASA scientists.

http://bit.ly/1xcUvir

*Can Bio-Computers Kill Cancer Cells*

by
Chuck Seegert

"New research from ETH Zurich has made progress towards achieving bio-computers by developing a biological circuit that controls individual sensory components. Future developments of this technology could enable complex, cancer-hunting bio-computers.

?http://bit.ly/1vPrqoW

*Just add water* — *programmable in vitro diagnostics*

by
Linda Koch

"Concerns about biosafety, practicality and costs have traditionally confined engineered synthetic gene circuits hosted in living cells to research environments, despite the great potential that these molecular tools hold for biotechnology and medical applications. Now, US researchers have circumvented these difficulties by using porous materials such as paper as host substrates for cell-free synthetic…"


 http://bit.ly/1uBp8zi

by
Michael A. Corsello and    Neil K. Garg

"In the developing world, multi-drug resistant malaria caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum is an epidemic that claims the lives of 1–3 million people per year. Artemisinin, a naturally occurring small molecule that has seen little resistance from malarial parasites, is a valuable weapon in the fight against this disease. Several easily accessible artemisinin derivatives, including artesunate and artemether, display potent antimalarial activity against drug-resistant malaria strains; however, the global supply of artemisinin from natural sources alone remains highly inconsistent and unreliable. As a result, several approaches to artemisinin production have been developed, spanning areas such as total synthesis, flow chemistry, synthetic biology, and semi-synthesis. This review highlights achievements in all areas, in addition to the interplay between synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry that has fueled the recent industrial-scale production of artemisinin."


 http://rsc.li/ZVvuLl

*‘STARFISH’ CRYSTALS COULD LEAD TO 3D-PRINTED PILLS*

by
Nicole Casal Moore-Michigan 

"Engineers have figured out how to make rounded crystals with no facets, a design that mimics the hard-to-duplicate texture of starfish shells.

 http://bit.ly/1tdFCve

by
Hideaki Matsubayashi, Takuya Ueda

"A cell free protein synthesis approach is extensively used for biochemical and synthetic biology researches. Unlike lysate based cell free systems, the PURE system is reconstituted with individually purified factors essential for transcriptional and translational processes. Hence, the components in the PURE system can be definitely manipulated as per the desired situation. Because of this high controllability, the PURE system has been applied to a wide range of research scene, such as biochemical analysis in reconstructed system, in vitro protein engineering, reconstitution of an artificial cell. We believe that this purified cell-free protein synthesis system become a basal technology to advance synthetic biology."

http://bit.ly/1t6YrQz

by
Wolfe BR, Pierce NA.

"We describe an algorithm for designing the equilibrium base-pairing properties of a test tube of interacting nucleic acid strands. A target test tube is specified as a set of desired “on-target” complexes, each with a target secondary structure and target concentration, and a set of undesired “off-target” complexes, each with vanishing target concentration. Sequence design is performed by optimizing the test tube ensemble defect, corresponding to the concentration of incorrectly paired nucleotides at equilibrium evaluated over the ensemble of the test tube. To reduce the computational cost of accepting or rejecting mutations to a random initial sequence, the structural ensemble of each on-target complex is hierarchically decomposed into a tree of conditional subensembles, yielding a forest of decomposition trees. Candidate sequences are evaluated efficiently at the leaf level of the decomposition forest by estimating the test tube ensemble defect from conditional physical properties calculated over the leaf subensembles. As optimized subsequences are merged toward the root level of the forest, any emergent defects are eliminated via ensemble redecomposition and sequence reoptimization. After successfully merging subsequences to the root level, the exact test tube ensemble defect is calculated for the first time, explicitly checking for the effect of the previously neglected off-target complexes. Any off-target complexes that form at appreciable concentration are hierarchically decomposed, added to the decomposition forest, and actively destabilized during subsequent forest reoptimization. For target test tubes representative of design challenges in the molecular programming and synthetic biology communities, our test tube design algorithm typically succeeds in achieving a normalized test tube ensemble defect ≤1% at a design cost within an order of magnitude of the cost of test tube analysis."

http://bit.ly/ZFjGwL