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With such ambitious goals as helping cure cancer and eradicating pervasive disease, some of the most talented scientists in the country from the emerging field of synthetic biology are breaking new ground at Northwestern University. 
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MIT biological and electrical engineers have combined E.coli cells with gold nanoparticles to make the bacteria conductive -- all using "sticky" biofilms
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A study published on March 20, 2014 reports on the possibility of computers to accurately create virtual mugshots of an individual based solely on that person’s DNA. Several scientists from around ...
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Gerd Moe-Behrens's insight:
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Terry Johnson of UC Berkeley and Synberc provides a perspective on the unique features of synthetic biology that require special consideration above and beyo...
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The success of the $1,000 genome programme offers lessons for fostering innovation.
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"Take Synthetic biology and turn it from where it is now the purview of big corporates and academia and turn it into a fertile field for entrepreneurship and particularly interested in an Open Sour...
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Gerd Moe-Behrens's insight:
by • CRISPR-Cas systems are adaptive immune systems present in bacteria and archaea. • Cas9 in complex with guide RNAs can localize to specific DNA sequences. • Cas9 variants can activate or repress transcription in bacteria and eukaryotes. • Post-transcriptional control strategies using CRISPR-Cas systems are emerging." "The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) arrays and their CRISPR associated (Cas) proteins constitute adaptive immune systems in bacteria and archaea that provide protection from bacteriophages, plasmids and other mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Recently, the ability to direct these systems to DNA in a sequence-specific manner has led to the emergence of new technologies for engineered gene regulation in bacteria and eukaryotes. These systems have the potential to enable facile high-throughput functional genomics studies aimed at identifying gene function and will be a crucial tool for synthetic biology. Here, we review the recent engineering of these systems for controlling gene expression."
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Cork County Hall hosted the Synthetic Biology Future event on 13 March, bringing in some of the leading authorities on the future technology from Ireland and the world.
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Gerd Moe-Behrens's insight:
by The human microbiota represents the trillions of bacteria that live on the skin, in the oral, nasal, and aural cavities, and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. The species that live in the gastrointestinal tract, the gut microbiota, closely interact with host cells and have a profound impact on health. To develop tools to effectively monitor the gut microbiota and ultimately help in disease diagnosis, we have engineered Escherichia coli to sense and record environmental stimuli, and demonstrated that E. coli with such memory systems can survive and function in the mammalian gut. This work demonstrates that E. coli can be engineered into living diagnostics capable of nondestructively probing the mammalian gut.
Abstract The mammalian gut is a dynamic community of symbiotic microbes that interact with the host to impact health, disease, and metabolism. We constructed engineered bacteria that survive in the mammalian gut and sense, remember, and report on their experiences. Based on previous genetic memory systems, we constructed a two-part system with a “trigger element” in which the lambda Cro gene is transcribed from a tetracycline-inducible promoter, and a “memory element” derived from the cI/Cro region of phage lambda. The memory element has an extremely stable cI state and a Cro state that is stable for many cell divisions. When Escherichia coli bearing the memory system are administered to mice treated with anhydrotetracycline, the recovered bacteria all have switched to the Cro state, whereas those administered to untreated mice remain in the cI state. The trigger and memory elements were transferred from E. coli K12 to a newly isolated murine E. coli strain; the stability and switching properties of the memory element were essentially identical in vitro and during passage through mice, but the engineered murine E. coli was more stably established in the mouse gut. This work lays a foundation for the use of synthetic genetic circuits as monitoring systems in complex, ill-defined environments, and may lead to the development of living diagnostics and therapeutics."
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Gerd Moe-Behrens's insight:
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With such ambitious goals as helping cure cancer and eradicating pervasive disease, scientists from the emerging field of synthetic biology are breaking new ground at Northwestern University in Evanston.
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Inspired by natural materials such as bone -- a matrix of minerals and other substances, including living cells -- engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots. These "living materials" combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales, with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.
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Arizona State University Synthetic biologist to discuss creating life in the lab at ASU lecture Arizona State University Benner is a Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and a pioneer in the burgeoning field of...
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From
phys
(Phys.org) —Dreaming up nanostructures that have desirable optical, electronic, or magnetic properties is one thing. Figuring out how to make them is another. A new strategy uses the binding properties of complementary strands of DNA to attach nanoparticles to each other and builds up a layered thin-film ...
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Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2014 3:17 PM
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(PRWEB) March 19, 2014 -- Learn how to use GenoCAD, a Computer-Assited Design application for synthetic biology, Thursday, March 27th, at 18:00 p.m. UTC/2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT.
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Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 18, 2014 11:11 AM
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Trying to draw boundaries for a field of knowledge is a hopeless effort. The old joke about the undergrad that was very confused when he found out that Biology is Chemistry, Chemistry is Physics an...
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Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 18, 2014 10:57 AM
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by
Hal Hodson
"Think of them as tiny environmental health officers. Bacteria have been engineered to monitor the state of a live animal's gut. The work is a first step towards developing genetically modified bacteria that non-invasively diagnose problems such as gut infections or inflammation.
