 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 10:00 AM
|
Molecular docking is the most commonly used technique in the modern drug discovery process where computational approaches involving docking algorithms are used to dock small molecules into macromolecular target structures.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:32 AM
|
"Optogenetics is an emerging field that combines optical and genetic approaches to non-invasively interfere with cellular events with exquisite spatiotemporal control. Although it arose originally from neuroscience, optogenetics is widely applicable to the study of many different biological systems and the range of applications arising from this technology continues to increase. Moreover, the repertoire of light-sensitive proteins used for devising new optogenetic tools is rapidly expanding. Light, Oxygen, or Voltage sensing (LOV) and Blue-Light-Utilizing flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) (BLUF) domains represent new contributors to the optogenetic toolkit. These small (100-140-amino acids) flavoprotein modules are derived from plant and bacterial photoreceptors that respond to UV-A/blue light. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in uncovering the photoactivation mechanisms of both LOV and BLUF domains. This knowledge has been applied in the design of synthetic photoswitches and fluorescent reporters with applications in cell biology and biotechnology. In this review, we summarize the photochemical properties of LOV and BLUF photosensors and highlight some of the recent advances in how these flavoproteins are being employed to artificially regulate and image a variety of biological processes..."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:14 AM
|
Computer hackers could create malicious software that crosses the line from technology to biology, crafting viruses that could spread dangerous epidemics.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:03 AM
|
"Say bacteria. People think infection. Or yogurts. But in Chile, bacteria are being used to get at something this country heavily depends on: copper. Chile is the world's biggest copper exporter, and has the planet's largest known reserves of the red metal. The Atacama Desert, a desolate rocky plateau west of the Andes mountains, is dotted with copper mines. Every now and then, a mining train passes through the arid landscape. Here and there the ruins of tiny towns still stand where miners used to live decades ago, their mud huts gradually falling to pieces under the baking sun. Export of the metal is essential for Chile's economy - it amounts to about 70% of all Chilean exports - and the more copper the country digs out, the more money pours in. The demand for the metal is continually increasing too; copper is used in most of our lives, from electrical wires and telephone lines to roofing materials, from nutritional supplements to jewellery. This metallic element originated millions of years ago deep inside the Earth, and through geological processes finally came closer to the surface...."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 8:18 AM
|
"Governing Synthetic Biology
Issue Date: 19 Mar 2012
Date Released: 19 March 2012 Read the latest in the Appropriate Governance of Life Science briefing series by Joyce Tait Appropriate Governance of the Life Sciences (AGLS) is a series of policy briefs describing Innogen's research on:
Strategic innovation issues in life sciences
The governance and regulation of innovation
The resulting innovation trajectories determining which products are developed and which companies take the lead in developing them
Governing Synthetic Biology: The appropriate risk governance concept, developed by the ESRC Innogen Centre, is enabling of innovation, minimises risk to people and the environment, and balances the interests and values of all relevant stakeholders.
Synthetic biology is one important illustration of how rapid advances in the life sciences are opening up potentially important new applications in medicine and healthcare, agriculture, industrial chemistry and energy production. Credible, effective and appropriate governance systems are a key part of ensuring that the benefits of synthetic biology are realised while minimising risks.
This policy brief is based on a policy brief prepared for the International Risk Governance Council (www.irgc.org). Download AGLS (11): Governing Synthetic Biology (PDF 985 KB)"
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 20, 2012 9:35 AM
|
Leukippos: (Greek: Λεύκιππος, first half of 5th century BC) was the first Greek to develop the theory of atomism — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippus). Without this kind of thinking, we did not know atoms and finally DNA. There is a strong line form ancient greece to modern science. I put here some videos together how this fits into the picture of modern synthetic biology and why the thoughts of these people, who lived a long time ago in ancient greece are still of timeless importance for understanding the basic concepts of science ".......About 2500 years ago there was a glorious awakening. Greek philosophers argued that the universe is knowable. Why? Their reasoning: It is ordered. About 600 BC we meet the pioneers of science. Mysticism was obsolete. The world could be explained with the help of what they called logos. They started asking the question of how nature is built. They figured out that the base for all understanding of nature is the question: What is reality?
Some believed that all reality has a mental origin. This led to the concept of idealism, which we will come back to later.
Others saw matter as a base of reality. This resulted in the concept of materialism, which has been the leading paradigm of science for the past decades.........Contemporary research has come to a point where we change the perspective from reduction to holism. The reductionistic approach has successfully identified many components and interactions, but does not provide convincing explanation for how a complex system, such as a living being work. Today we are in the situation that we have huge amounts of data from high throughput experiments, but we do not understand the whole picture......How to understand the whole picture? How to understand huge data amounts and complex systems?......On the theoretical side new theories for dealing with huge data-amounts and complex systems have emerged:
We can follow this development back to the Greek idealistic philosopher Plato (360-347). He introduced in his dialogue Philebus a concept called
System. A system is according to Plato a model for thinking about how complex structures are developed: System meant total, crowd, union...." http://bit.ly/lMbKc8 I always have been an admire of Carl Sagan. He made some videos for his Cosmos series called: The pioneers of Science. Still very exiting! http://bit.ly/GBG8HK and http://bit.ly/GBGdv9 and http://bit.ly/GAB1ta In my opinion the SynBio dry lab is about systems theory based designing of abstraction. Thus its make for me big meaning to understand the big lines of what we are doing. We need to understand the whole picture.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 20, 2012 8:33 AM
|
by Benjamin A. Blount Tim Weenink, Serge Vasylechko, Tom Ellis "Yeast is an ideal organism for the development and application of synthetic biology, yet there remain relatively few well-characterised biological parts suitable for precise engineering of this chassis. In order to address this current need, we present here a strategy that takes a single biological part, a promoter, and re-engineers it to produce a fine-graded output range promoter library and new regulated promoters desirable for orthogonal synthetic biology applications. A highly constitutive Saccharomyces cerevisiae promoter, PFY1p, was identified by bioinformatic approaches, characterised in vivo and diversified at its core sequence to create a 36-member promoter library. TetR regulation was introduced into PFY1p to create a synthetic inducible promoter (iPFY1p) that functions in an inverter device. Orthogonal and scalable regulation of synthetic promoters was then demonstrated for the first time using customisable Transcription Activator-Like Effectors (TALEs) modified and designed to act as orthogonal repressors for specific PFY1-based promoters. The ability to diversify a promoter at its core sequences and then independently target Transcription Activator-Like Orthogonal Repressors (TALORs) to virtually any of these sequences shows great promise toward the design and construction of future synthetic gene networks that encode complex “multi-wire” logic functions.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 2:56 PM
|
[Bio]nanotechnology & Programmable Matter
Carlos Olguin
Head of [Bio]nanotechnology & Programmable Matter Group
Nanotechnology, the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale, is an emerging meta-field growing at an accelerated pace. It is in our interest to identify the implications of nanotechnology and programmable matter for the industries that are currently supported by Autodesk software. It is equally important to early assess the new design spaces enabled by nanotechnology, in particular in regards to life & materials sciences. Today, the design paradigm behind programmable matter is one that can be gradually applied to concrete projects across a range of domains and metric scales. The cross-pollination across projects will help create a robust scale-free body of knowledge.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 1:24 PM
|
Berkeley Conference: Unmasking the Bay Area Biolab and Synthetic biology– Event on 2012-03-29 19:00:00 Location Details: David Brower Center 2150 Allston...
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 1:19 PM
|
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 8:15 AM
|
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 18, 2012 3:06 PM
|
"“What I cannot build, I cannot understand”. This phrase by the genius physicist Richard Feynman is cleverly encrypted into the genetic code of the first bacterial cells with an artificial genome that have ever existed. Actually the quote says “what I cannot create…”, but maybe the scientists at the JCVI –who are behind this tremendous breakthrough- preferred to save some base pairs to avoid the use of the word “create” and its tricky implications. They published this work in 2010 and opened a whole new world of possibilities and made it completely clear to anyone what we mean when we talk about Synthetic Biology and what its ultimate purpose should be: to understand life by building it...."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 17, 2012 5:15 PM
|
We believe that innovations in biology should be
accessible, affordable, and open to everyone. We’re building a community biology lab for
amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs,
and anyone who wants to
experiment with friends. Welcome to BioCurious Visit the BioCurious homepage http://www.BioCurious.org BioCurious Community Lab Opened in Sunnyvale, CA Fall 2011!
|
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:57 AM
|
"The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:19 AM
|
"Synthetic Biology: Emerging Global Markets Synthetic biology is a rapidly emerging biotechnology discipline with a wide range of applications. Despite its emerging status, synthetic biology provides a significant number of near-term commercial opportunities, and the list of new products and applications is continuously growing. These applications include specialty chemicals, enzymes, synthetic genes and other DNA parts, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and chassis microorganisms. ( http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=147795&rt=Synthetic-Biology-Emerging-Global-Markets.html ) The goal for this study is to determine the specific applications and forecast global market demand for synthetic biology products over a 5-year period from 2008 to 2013. Our particular interest is to characterize and quantify the synthetic biology products market potential by technology and end-use market segments. We also analyze the synthetic biology industry structure, competitors, and intellectual property landscape. It is important for companies in industries affected by the developments in synthetic biology to sort through the many potential applications to identify near-term commercial opportunities for product development focus. This report allows companies to prioritize product opportunities, establishing a solid framework for strategic planning. Synthetic biology encompasses a wide range of industries, including life science tools, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, energy, and chemicals. Because of its wide scope, synthetic biology will play an important role in the future of the industrial economy of the early 21st century. Ongoing advances in enabling technologies, such as microfluidics, DNA synthesis, DNA sequencing, and bioinformatics, as well as a need for renewable feedstocks, are driving the growth of synthetic biology. Rapid developments in these multidisciplinary fields promise to advance the synthetic biology industry and create unique market opportunities. This report analyzes these trends and their impact on the future markets for synthetic biology products. For more information kindly visit : http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=147795&rt=Synthetic-Biology-Emerging-Global-Markets.html Related Reports The Future of the Biologicals Market: Market overview, innovations and company profiles
http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=133976&rt=The-Future-of-the-Biologicals-Market-Market-overview-innovations-and-company-profiles.html China biological, biochemical products manufacturing industry, 2010
http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=133803&rt=China-biological-biochemical-products-manufacturing-industry-2010.html"
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 9:08 AM
|
"By the middle of this century, nearly two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. If we want their lives to be pleasant, and the resources they use to be sustainable, urban development is going to have to change radically. That's the thesis of architect Rachel Armstrong, who works with synthetic biology to create prototypes of "living cities" built using biological materials. She imagines a future where cities aren't built, but instead grown like plants or baked like bread...."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 8:28 AM
|
"1. Informatics for adding value to information The quantity of information now available to individuals and organizations is unprecedented in human history, and the rate of information generation continues to grow exponentially. Yet, the sheer volume of information is in danger of creating more noise than value, and as a result limiting its effective use. Innovations in how information is organized, mined and processed hold the key to filtering out the noise and using the growing wealth of global information to address emerging challenges. 2. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering The natural world is a testament to the vast potential inherent in the genetic code at the core of all living organisms. Rapid advances in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering are allowing biologists and engineers to tap into this potential in unprecedented ways, enabling the development of new biological processes and organisms that are designed to serve specific purposes – whether converting biomass to chemicals, fuels and materials, producing new therapeutic drugs or protecting the body against harm. 3. Green Revolution 2.0 – technologies for increased food and biomass Artificial fertilizers are one of the main achievements of modern chemistry, enabling unprecedented increases in crop production yield. Yet, the growing global demand for healthy and nutritious food is threatening to outstrip energy, water and land resources. By integrating advances across the biological and physical sciences, the new green revolution holds the promise of further increasing crop production yields, minimizing environmental impact, reducing energy and water dependence, and decreasing the carbon footprint. 4. Nanoscale design of materials The increasing demand on natural resources requires unprecedented gains in efficiency. Nanostructured materials with tailored properties, designed and engineered at the molecular scale, are already showing novel and unique features that will usher in the next clean energy revolution, reduce our dependence on depleting natural resources, and increase atom-efficiency manufacturing and processing. 5. Systems biology and computational modelling/simulation of chemical and biological systems For improved healthcare and bio-based manufacturing, it is essential to understand how biology and chemistry work together. Systems biology and computational modelling and simulation are playing increasingly important roles in designing therapeutics, materials and processes that are highly efficient in achieving their design goals, while minimally impacting on human health and the environment....."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 21, 2012 8:06 AM
|
"Nokia's haptic tattoo patent application may seem like the stuff of science fiction. However, "when you consider the nanobiology and synthetic biology applications, the possibilities of having a fully functional local device attached to the body becomes very likely," said James Canton, CEO of the Institute for Global Futures. "With this convergence, you start to see a new technology platform, one that could make mobile phones of today seem like a very minor story."..."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 20, 2012 8:39 AM
|
by Gustafsson C, Minshull J, Govindarajan S, Ness J, Villalobos A, Welch M. "The DNA sequence used to encode a polypeptide can have dramatic effects on its expression. Lack of readily available tools has until recently inhibited meaningful experimental investigation of this phenomenon. Advances in synthetic biology and the application of modern engineering approaches now provide the tools for systematic analysis of the sequence variables affecting heterologous expression of recombinant proteins. We here discuss how these new tools are being applied and how they circumvent the constraints of previous approaches, highlighting some of the surprising and promising results emerging from the developing field of gene engineering...."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 20, 2012 8:30 AM
|
"(Nanowerk News) Scientists are one step closer to making more complex microscopic biological machines, following improvements in the way that they can "re-wire" DNA in yeast, according to research recently published in the journal PLoS ONE ("Rational Diversification of a Promoter Providing Fine-Tuned Expression and Orthogonal Regulation for Synthetic Biology"). The researchers, from Imperial College London, have demonstrated a way of creating a new type of biological "wire," using proteins that interact with DNA and behave like wires in electronic circuitry. The scientists say the advantage of their new biological wire is that it can be re-engineered over and over again to create potentially billions of connections between DNA components. Previously, scientists have had a limited number of "wires" available with which to link DNA components in biological machines, restricting the complexity that could be achieved.
The team has also developed more of the fundamental DNA components, called "promoters," which are needed for re-programming yeast to perform different tasks. Scientists currently have a very limited catalogue of components from which to engineer biological machines. By enlarging the components pool and making it freely available to the scientific community via rapid Open Access publication, the team in this new study aims to spur on development in the field of synthetic biology.
Future applications of this work could include tiny yeast-based machines that can be dropped into water supplies to detect contaminants, and yeast that records environmental conditions during the manufacture of biofuels to determine if improvements can be made to the production process.
Dr Tom Ellis, senior author of the paper from the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation and the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, says: "From viticulture to making bread, humans have been working with yeast for thousands of years to enhance society. Excitingly, our work is taking us closer to developing more complex biological machines with yeast. These tiny biological machines could help to improve things such as pollution monitoring and cleaner fuels, which could make a difference in all our lives."..."
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 1:26 PM
|
Life Technologies Corporation LIFE +0.17% today announced the launch of GeneArt® Precision TALs, generally referred to as TAL effector proteins (TALE), which will allow researchers the ability to edit genomes and control gene activity with unprecedented precision and reliability.
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 1:21 PM
|
The world has an energy problem. And a carbon problem. Amidst the debate about the various forms of renewable energy and efforts to reduce carbon em...
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 10:00 AM
|
Leukippos - Synthetic Biology Dry Lab: a new FB group!
a new FB group for all interested in SynBio in silico:
databases, computational tools for analysis, modeling and optimization...... Circuit design and simulation, circuit optimization, DNA and RNA design, protein design, integrated workflows, computer aided design, integration of safety, tools for cloud collaboration.....
http://on.fb.me/xHvMAZ
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 19, 2012 7:33 AM
|
|
|
Scooped by
Gerd Moe-Behrens
March 17, 2012 6:13 PM
|
"Scientists Manipulate Electrons Into Material Never Seen on Earth
Stanford scientists have created designer electrons that behave as if they were exposed to a magnetic field of 60 Tesla—a force 30 percent stronger than anything ever sustained on Earth. The work could lead to a revolution in the materials that make everything from video displays to airplanes to mobile phones. "The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies," said Hari Manoharan, associate professor of physics at Stanford and a member of SLAC's Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, who led the research. "We're now able to tune the fundamental properties of electrons so they behave in ways rarely seen in ordinary materials.""
|
![[Bio]nanotechnology & Programmable Matter - Groups - Autodesk Research | SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/Oge5fteK34teUkd_Qr8hazl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
