SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute
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Open questions in origin of life: experimental studies on the origin of nucleic acids and proteins with specific and functional sequences by a chemical synthetic biology approach 
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Drew Endy today at Stanford 11.30 am: What is synthetic biology and why does it matter? http://stanford.io/1fNZnyl
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TEDxVilnius 2014: THE FUTURE IS OURS - Feb 22nd, Saturday, Theatre Arena, Olimpieciu str. 3
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Human Biology Hacker Sean Ward on stage "How Synthetic Biology Is Exploring Biological Complexity http://bit.ly/1egbTFH
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1. DonorsChoose.orgFor teaching government a thing or two about education reform. Most of us can agree that the U.S. school system is a mess: State...
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Genspace is ranked #4 in world's most innovative education companies!
malek's comment,
February 19, 2014 6:03 PM
Kaplan is always the one you hate to love. Very interesting post.
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March 13 | Cork, Ireland http://bit.ly/1biIxvs
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Surgeons can precisely position cells on the site of injury and speed up recovery.
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COLD SPRING HARBOR ASIA CONFERENCES: Synthetic Biology - Suzhou, China December 1-5, 2014 http://bit.ly/MUVtN4
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By Jenny Rooke As a zealous believer in the potential of synthetic biology, I’ve been looking to invest in synthetic biology tools and applications for years (not as long as some, longer than many). I’ve even put serious thought into raising a venture fund with a focus on synthetic biology investments, but, for now, conclude that there simply aren’t enough investment-grade opportunities to justify a dedicated fund (yet!). Why is it challenging to invest in synthetic biology companies? What is the disconnect between that sense of enormous potential and actually betting on companies to achieve it (besides investors’ reputations for being more risk averse than we’d like to admit)? Here are several barriers to investing in synthetic biology that I’ve observed, drawing on comparisons to biotech investing more generally. Transition from labs to enterprise We’re still early in the process of transitioning synthetic biology technologies out of research labs and into applied, for-profit settings (i.e., companies). In the last decade, the field has seen a profusion of novel pathway design tools, gene editing techniques, DNA synthesis and sequencing technologies, and analytical tools — all of which fuel that sense of synthetic biology’s potential. We are closer than ever to being able to go from an idea for a novel genetic pathway to proof of concept, rapidly and inexpensively. But we’re not yet at the point where the cost, performance, and scalability of the tools are suitable to broad commercial application. As an example, I see a number of startups whose business plan hinges on engineering a proprietary genetic pathway in a microbial host for production of a particular high value chemical. The tools are there to test their hypothesis — which in itself is a remarkable advance over even five years ago. But it’s still so expensive, slow, and unpredictable that they’ll get only one or two shots at making it work on early-stage capital. That’s a fairly high degree of technical risk for an investor to embrace...."
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Scientists have used gene therapy to direct stem cells to grow new cartilage inside a living body.
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Accurate spatiotemporal regulation of genetic expression and cell microenvironment are both essential to epithelial morphogenesis during development, wound healing and cancer. In vivo, this is achieved through the interplay between intrinsic cellular properties and extrinsic signals. Amongst these, morphogen gradie
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by First discovered in bacteria in 1987, CRISPRs (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) have recently been harnessed as so-called genome-editing tools. These tools allow researchers to home in on “typos” within the three-billion-letter sequence of the human genome, and cut out or alter problematic sequences. The Cas9 complex, which includes the CRISPR “cleaving” enzyme Cas9 and an RNA “guide” that leads the enzyme to its DNA target, is key to this process. “We’ve come to view the Cas9 complex as the ultimate ‘guided missile’ that we can use to target precise sites in the genome,” says co-senior author Feng Zhang, the W.M. Keck Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering in MIT’s departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, and a member of the Broad Institute and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This study provides a schematic of the entire system — it shows the missile (the Cas9 protein), the programming instructions (the guide RNA) that send it to the right location, and the target DNA. It also reveals the secret of how these pieces function together to make the whole system work.” To deconstruct this system, Zhang approached the paper’s co-senior author, Osamu Nureki of the University of Tokyo. Together, they assembled a team to work out the complicated structure. “Cas9-based genome-editing technologies are proving to be revolutionary in a wide range of life sciences, enabling many new experimental techniques, so my colleagues and I were excited to work with Feng’s lab on this important research,” says first author Hiroshi Nishimasu, an assistant professor of biophysics and biochemistry who works in Nureki’s lab at the University of Tokyo. The two teams worked closely to reveal the structural details of the Cas9 complex and to test their functional significance. Their efforts revealed a division of labor within the Cas9 complex. The researchers determined that the Cas9 protein consists of two lobes: One lobe is involved in the recognition of the RNA and DNA elements, while the other lobe is responsible for cleaving the target DNA, causing what is known as a “double strand break” that disables the targeted gene. The team also found that key structures on Cas9 interface with the guide RNA, allowing Cas9 to organize itself around the RNA and the target DNA as it prepares to cut the strands. Identifying the key features of the Cas9 complex should enable researchers to improve the genome-editing tool to better suit their needs. “Up until now, it has been very difficult to rationally engineer Cas9. Now that we have this structural information, we can take a principled approach to engineering the protein to make it more effective,” says Zhang, who is also a co-founder of Editas Medicine, a company that was started last year to develop Cas9 and other genome-editing technologies into a novel class of human therapeutics. Currently, Cas9 is used in experiments to silence genes in mammalian cells — sometimes at multiple sites across the genome — and large libraries of RNA sequences have been created to guide Cas9 to genes of interest. However, the system can only target specific types of sites. Some studies have also shown that the RNA could lead Cas9 “off target,” potentially causing unexpected problems within the cellular machinery. The researchers plan to use this new, detailed picture of the Cas9 complex to address these concerns. “Understanding this structure may help us engineer around the current limitations of the Cas9 complex,” says co-author F. Ann Ran, a graduate student in Zhang’s lab. “In the future, it could allow us to design versions of these editing tools that are more specific to our research needs. We may even be able to alter the type of nucleic acid sequences that Cas9 can target.” Such technological improvements will be needed if the CRISPR-Cas system is to evolve into a therapeutic tool for the treatment of genetic disease. Dana Carroll, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, says the new structural findings provide a basis for both understanding and modifying the CRISPR-Cas system. “Like many crystal structures, this one of the Cas9-sgRNA-DNA complex confirms and rationalizes many inferences from biological and biochemical studies, and it provides further insight into the functions of the complex. By doing so it suggests approaches to enhancing or modulating the activity of the Cas9 protein, some of which the authors have tested in a preliminary fashion,” says Carroll, who was not part of the research team. The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health; an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; the Japan Science and Technology Agency; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; the Keck, McKnight, Poitras, Merkin, Vallee, Damon Runyon, Searle Scholars, Klingenstein, and Simons foundations; as well as Bob Metcalfe and Jane Pauley. Other researchers who worked on the study include Patrick D. Hsu, Silvana Konermann, Soraya Shehata, Naoshi Dohmae, and Ryuichiro Ishitani."
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Markus Gershater
"Synthetic biology is a new field, but it sometimes feels like we already have dogma. The idea that de novo DNA synthesis costs are limiting seems so ingrained: many of the major news stories we hear in synthetic biology are the latest milestones of ever larger chunks of DNA being stitched together, ever increasing numbers of strains being created, and the cost of DNA synthesis falling exponentially. There’s no doubt that the advances to date have been phenomenal, and I certainly tell anyone who gives me half a chance about how processes that took months when I was a PhD student can now be solved in minutes (and it really wasn’t that long ago). The problem is, I’m not sure our attitudes have kept up with this pace of change: it’s the thesis of this post that due to these immensely rapid advances, DNA synthesis is no longer such an issue and we should now focus as a community on the bigger problem of effectively addressing biological complexity.
http://bit.ly/MZ7lhd