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Tools that allow for rapid, accurate and inexpensive assembly of multi-component combinatorial libraries of DNA for transformation into plants will accelerate the progress of synthetic biology research. 
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SYNMOD is based on a real scientific project that uses synthetic biology to design new antibiotics. http://bit.ly/1e6IWwm
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How do we enable citizen scientists to identify fragile Alaskan species?
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Great project. Ellen Jorgensen and Genspace are doing awesome work. Their microryza project deserve all support.
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Design concept: Living food...... Kim, a student at the Royal College of the Arts, explored this terrifying convergence of trends in a project called Living Food. Looking at diners’ willingness (eagerness?) to get weird in the context of our advancements in the world of man-made organisms and genetic modification, Kim dreamed up three dishes that behave like living creatures. Depending on your outlook, they’re either the stuff of avant garde foodie dreams or a perfect reason to reboot Fear Factor..."
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by Xia Wang, Jian-Guo Yang, Li Chen, Ji-Long Wang, Qi Cheng, Ray Dixon Yi-Ping Wang"Biological nitrogen fixation is a complex process requiring multiple genes working in concert. To date, the Klebsiella pneumoniae nif gene cluster, divided into seven operons, is one of the most studied systems. Its nitrogen fixation capacity is subject to complex cascade regulation and physiological limitations. In this report, the entire K. pneumoniae nif gene cluster was reassembled as operon-based BioBrick parts in Escherichia coli. It provided ~100% activity of native K. pneumoniae system. Based on the expression levels of these BioBrick parts, a T7 RNA polymerase–LacI expression system was used to replace the σ54-dependent promoters located upstream of nif operons. Expression patterns of nif operons were critical for the maximum activity of the recombinant system. By mimicking these expression levels with variable-strength T7-dependent promoters, ~42% of the nitrogenase activity of the σ54-dependent nif system was achieved in E. coli. When the newly constructed T7-dependent nif system was challenged with different genetic and physiological conditions, it bypassed the original complex regulatory circuits, with minor physiological limitations. Therefore, we have successfully replaced the nif regulatory elements with a simple expression system that may provide the first step for further research of introducing nif genes into eukaryotic organelles, which has considerable potentials in agro-biotechnology."
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June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Rachel Crane visits Singularity University, on the brink of accelerating human progress. "Bloomberg Brink" can be seen ever...
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Download the free eBook here to find out more about how synthetic biology will change your industry >What is Synthetic Biology?Synthetic biology is a rapidly
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By Christina Agapakis "Richard Feynman was a brilliant, bongo-playing, lock-picking, eminently quotable physicist. His quips, on anything from the pleasure of findings things out to the key to science to how fire works are standard fare for science fans. For synthetic biologists, it’s a quotation he left on his last blackboard at Caltech before his death in 1988 that is most frequently quoted: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” This statement gives quotable form to the “drive to make” that happens when engineers start doing biology. Feynman of course wasn’t an engineer, he was a theoretical physicist–a field less often associated with creating stuff than with creating equations. But Feynman also liked to dabble in other fields, including a sabbatical year in Max Delbrück’s biology lab at Caltech studying genetic mutations in viruses that infect bacteria. The chapter on this disciplinary dabbling in Feynman’s autobiography, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, is a fascinating look at what happens when a physicist starts doing biology. I read Surely You’re Joking during college, just as I was starting to work in a biology lab. I still vividly remember one tiny anecdote about the general applicability of a certain lab technique in everyday life, a technique I was just starting to get the hang of while I was reading the book: There was one useful lab technique I learned in that course which I still use today. They taught us how to hold a test tube and take its cap off with one hand (you use your middle and index fingers), while leaving the other hand free to do something else (like hold a pipette that you’re sucking cyanide up into). Now I can hold my toothbrush in one hand, and with the other hand, hold the tube of toothpaste, twist the cap off, and put it back on. For Feynman, these little tricks of the trade–the tacit knowledge that biologists gain through experience–end up being the focus of his biological excursion more than any facts about bacteria, phage, and DNA. He concludes that: I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience. I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. These stories of these lessons are told with Feynman’s quirky mix of charming arrogance and humility, the strange combination of traits that gave him the confidence and the curiosity to jump into a new field. Feynman discusses giving a presentation to fellow students in a biology class at Princeton, the other students “laughing hysterically” at his mispronunciation of common biology terms. Later, the class urges him to move on after an especially long introduction of background facts saying, “We know all that!” He replied: “Oh” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. The chapter’s title, “A Map of the Cat?”, comes from a short anecdote that captures Feynman’s humility and humor when confronted with too many new facts: I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I had not the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” she asked horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!” From then on there were rumors about a dumb biology student who was looking for “a map of the cat.” Rereading the chapter now after many years in biology labs, I’m particularly struck by they way Feynman describes experimental work, the early molecular biology tools and techniques that require “great care and a lot of tedious work.” More than the facts or the jargon or the disciplinary conventions for writing papers, this is where the biggest differences appear between the practice of biology and the practice of theoretical physics. Feynman’s legendary ability to think through problems in physics–his “problem-solving algorithm”–didn’t help as much in the lab, leading him at one point to say, “It would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good biologist. But I wasn’t a good biologist.”..."
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I was asked to give a talk to a group of science and technology educators from two-year colleges around the country this week.
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*Biological Signal Processing with a Genetic Toggle Switch * "Complex gene regulation requires responses that depend not only on the current levels of input signals but also on signals received in the past. In digital electronics, logic circuits with this property are referred to as sequential logic, in contrast to the simpler combinatorial logic without such internal memory. In molecular biology, memory is implemented in various forms such as biochemical modification of proteins or multistable gene circuits, but the design of the regulatory interface, which processes the input signals and the memory content, is often not well understood. Here, we explore design constraints for such regulatory interfaces using coarse-grained nonlinear models and stochastic simulations of detailed biochemical reaction networks. We test different designs for biological analogs of the most versatile memory element in digital electronics, the JK-latch. Our analysis shows that simple protein-protein interactions and protein-DNA binding are sufficient, in principle, to implement genetic circuits with the capabilities of a JK-latch. However, it also exposes fundamental limitations to its reliability, due to the fact that biological signal processing is asynchronous, in contrast to most digital electronics systems that feature a central clock to orchestrate the timing of all operations. We describe a seemingly natural way to improve the reliability by invoking the master-slave concept from digital electronics design. This concept could be useful to interpret the design of natural regulatory circuits, and for the design of synthetic biological systems."
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A robust family of Golden Gate Agrobacteirum vectors for plant synthetic biology http://bit.ly/17YD8nn ;