SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute

by
Bronwyn Adams-Queensland

"Using self-organizing stem cells, researchers grew a small kidney in a dish, paving the way for better kidney disease treatments.

 Professor Melissa Little, of University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience who led the study, says new treatments for kidney disease are urgently needed. “We need to improve outcomes for patients with this debilitating condition, which costs Australia $1.8 billion a year.” “One in three Australians is at risk of developing chronic kidney disease and the only therapies currently available are kidney transplant and dialysis,” Little explains. “Only one in four patients will receive a donated organ, and dialysis is an ongoing and restrictive treatment regime.” SELF-ORGANIZING CELLSThe team designed a protocol that prompts stem cells to form all the required cell types to “self-organize” into a mini kidney in a dish. ...."

 http://bit.ly/18znhjJ

*"The startup world is beating academics at their own game.”*

BY SAMUEL ARBESMAN

"I noticed recently that books with the phrase “The Last Man Who Knew Everything” all share in common that their subjects lived during the period close to the Scientific Revolution, roughly between 1550 to 1700. (The examples I own are about Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest born in 1602; Thomas Young, who studied topics such as optics and philology and was born in 1773; and Philadelphia area professor Joseph Leidy, who was born in 1823.) The Scientific Revolution killed our ability to Know Everything.It’s as if the Scientific Revolution — and the knowledge it spawned — killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide range of expertise) — but the weaving together of different disciplines was actually rather unexceptional. The Ancients discussed topics such as ethics, biology, and metaphysics alongside each other. The Babylonian Talmud discusses everything from astronomy and biology to morality and law, weaving them together into a single compendium. So what changed? Scientific knowledge exploded in size, mainly due to the application of the scientific method to our surroundings. As that knowledge base and its domain experts grew exponentially, we began classifying and ordering all that we understood — from the classification taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to manuals for categorizing mental disease. We made sense of our world by dividing information into manageable portions and distinct areas of proficiency. But as people began to specialize, knowledge became fragmented. We chose to know more and more about less and less. We may have expanded what we as a society know — but it was at the price of no single individual being able to truly know it all...."

http://wrd.cm/18IpAf8

by
Anonymous

"Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world’s leading university-research consortium for semiconductor technologies, launched the Semiconductor Synthetic Biology (SSB) research program on hybrid bio-semiconductor systems to provide insights and opportunities for future information and communication technologies. The program will initially fund research at six universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst, Yale, Georgia Tech, Brigham Young and the Univ. of Washington.

 “University researchers welcome this academia-industry partnership to do long-term research” Funded by SRC’s Global Research Collaboration (GRC), SSB concentrates on synergies between synthetic biology and semiconductor technology that can foster exploratory, multi-disciplinary, longer-term university research leading to novel, breakthrough solutions for a wide range of industries. Results from the university research, guided by semiconductor industry needs, should significantly enhance and accelerate opportunities for advancing properties, design and applications for future generations of integrated circuits. “The role of the SSB program is to stimulate non-traditional thinking about the issues facing the semiconductor industry, and these forward-looking projects will aggressively explore new dimensions for pairing biological activities and semiconductors to benefit society,” said Dr. Steven Hillenius, executive director for SRC-GRC. “We intend to seek new collaborative initiatives with the National Science Foundation and other agencies as part of the SSB program with the goal of producing disruptive information technologies for the future.” The first stage of the new program will support six exploratory projects in three related, but distinct, areas: (1) Cytomorphic-Semiconductor Circuit Design that applies lessons from cell biology to new chip architectures and vice versa; (2) Bio-Electric Sensors, Actuators and Energy Sources dedicated to enabling hybrid semiconductor-biological systems; and (3) Molecular-precision Additive Fabrication that creates manufacturing processes at the few-nanometer scale that are inspired by biology. Results from this Stage 1 research program will be used to guide future generations of SSB research. Approximately $2.25M will be invested by SRC-GRC for Phase 1 research. “University researchers welcome this academia-industry partnership to do long-term research,” said Professor Rahul Sarpeshkar of MIT. “Living cells can offer ground-breaking solutions to some hard problems faced by the semiconductor industry because they solved similar problems more than a billion years ago. Controlled chemical reactions and molecular flows in cells are the ultimate miniaturization of electronics to the atomic and molecular scale.” Specific profiles of the three areas of research are: Cytomorphic-Semiconductor Circuit Design Designers for semiconductor circuits and systems have begun to look to biological sciences for new approaches to analog and digital design and to circuits and system architectures, especially for minimum-energy electronic systems. The term ‘cytomorphic electronics’ refers to electronic circuits and information processing inspired by the operation of chemical circuits and information processing in cells. Bioelectric Sensors, Actuators and Energy Sources Biological sensors have the potential to play an important role in multi-functional semiconductor systems. SRC plans to integrate live cells with CMOS technology and thus form a hybrid bio-semiconductor system that provides high signal sensitivity and specificity at low operating energy. Molecular-precision Additive Fabrication As the demands continue to grow for the most exacting pattern formation for semiconductor fabrication—and feature sizes shrink to the 5 nanometer (nm) regime—molecular-based self-assembly could offer an alternative to lithographically driven manufacturing. DNA can be used as an active agent to provide information content to guide structure formation. SRC plans to pursue processes that will both improve fabrication yields and provide purification of correctly formed structures to significantly reduce the occurrence of defects in making DNA nano structures."

http://bit.ly/1dbLCJP

by
Lærke Münter Lassen , Agnieszka Zygadlo Nielsen , Bibi Ziersen , Thiyagarajan Gnanasekaran , Birger Lindberg Møller , and Poul Erik Jensen

"Photosynthesis in plants, green algae and cyanobacteria converts solar energy into chemical energy in the form of ATP and NADPH, both of which are used in primary metabolism. However, often more reducing power is generated by the photosystems than what is needed for primary metabolism. In this review we discuss the development in the research field focusing on how the photosystems can be used as synthetic biology building blocks to channel excess reducing power into light-driven production of alternative products. Plants synthesize a large number of high-value bioactive natural compounds. Some of the key enzymes catalyzing their biosynthesis are the cytochrome P450s situated in the endoplasmic reticulum. However, bioactive compounds are often synthesized in low quantities in the plants and are difficult to produce by chemical synthesis due to their often complex structures. Through a synthetic biology approach, enzymes with a requirement for reducing equivalents as cofactors, such as the cytochrome P450s, can be coupled directly to the photosynthetic energy output to obtain environmentally friendly production of complex chemical compounds. By relocating cytochrome P450s to the chloroplasts, reducing power can be diverted towards the reactions catalyzed by the cytochrome P450s. This provides a sustainable production method for high-value compounds that potentially can solve the problem of NADPH regeneration, which currently limits the biotechnological uses of cytochrome P450s. We describe the approaches that have been taken to couple enzymes to photosynthesis in vivo and to photosystem I in vitro and the challenges associated with this approach to develop new green production platforms."

 http://bit.ly/IVP8Pw

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http://bit.ly/1c1HldP

In the Internet era, research moves from professionals’ labs to amateurs’ homes

 

http://bit.ly/19w6hcD

by
Charles Gersbach

"Elaborate competitions to build the best robot or design cages to protect falling eggs have been a rite of passage for generations of engineering students. Today, there’s a new contest with the same creativity and competitive spirit, but vastly more sophisticated projects—like mixing-and-matching bits of DNA to create new microorganisms that produce biofuels or costly medicines.

The International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition challenges student teams to use cutting-edge tools from the new field of synthetic biology to design, build, and test genetically engineered organisms.  This fall, 133 teams of students from universities from around the world participated, producing an incredible array of projects.  Some engineered microorganisms to produce medicines, clean up environmental contaminants, or act as biosensors for toxins or other chemicals.  Others created genetically engineered living board games or transformed otherwise stinky bacteria to smell like wintergreen.  Our own Duke University iGEM team focused on engineering gene circuits in yeast to better understand how cells make decisions, such as whether to replicate or respond to an environmental stimulus; the circuits can also be used in biomanufacturing. If these examples surprise you, you’re not alone. As the New York Times observed, “iGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.” But we think this kind of hands-on experimentation and experience is precisely the way to prepare the next generation of leaders who can help society reap the benefits and manage the risks of synthetic biology—and other fields, for that matter. At a time when the discussion of the future of college education is largely focused on online teaching and massive open online courses (MOOCs), it is critical to recognize the importance of hands-on education that can only be provided in a dynamic research environment.  As Matt Baron, a biomedical engineering student and member of the Duke iGEM team, says: “If I had simply studied synthetic biology but not participated in the iGEM competition, I would not appreciate the practical implementation of the theoretical concepts—or how synthetic biology can be used to solve complex problems across seemingly unrelated fields such as medicine, agriculture, manufacturing and computing. More importantly, I would have lost the opportunity to take ownership over a project along with my team members.”  By encouraging freedom and independence in project design and exposing students to a new and exciting field as it is developing, the iGEM competition provides a quality of education that clearly cannot be replicated through online teaching, but is critical in educating the next generation of scientists and engineers. The iGEM competition also teaches participants the importance of considering broader implications of advances in synthetic biology, such as the safety and security of the engineered systems and ethical issues concerning genetic manipulation.  All projects are supervised by university faculty mentors, and the iGEM competition stresses environmental and societal responsibility as primary judging criteria.  Our iGEM team worked with Duke faculty in the Schools of Law and Public Policy to develop a report on intellectual property and synthetic biology, addressing concerns involving patenting of gene sequences and subsequent effects on basic research and the biotechnology industry.  These students are not just learning science and engineering—they’re being trained in aspects of philosophy, policy and business. But synthetic biology is not just an academic exercise. The number of synthetic biology companies has tripled over the last four years, from 61 to 192. The global synthetic biology market was estimated to be worth $2.1 billion in 2012 and is expected to expand to $16.7 billion by 2018. At this rate, the development of this nascent field is rapidly outpacing the release of new textbooks or other conventional educational models—whereas the iGEM competition adapts at the speed of student creativity, providing a new model for training that’s already proving its worth.  Many successful iGEM projects have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and several iGEM teams have even patented their inventions, creating opportunities to complement their science and engineering training with entrepreneurship experiences. Educational paradigms must evolve to train the next generation of scientists and engineers, going beyond cultivating creativity and inventiveness to developing social consciousness and the mindset to face the grand challenges for the 21st century.  The iGEM competition provides an excellent blueprint for how to achieve these goals by involving students not only in finding the right answers, but asking the right questions."

http://onforb.es/1jT4KkT