"The futuristic idea that microchips could be implanted under a patient's skin to control the release of drugs has taken another step forward.
U.S. scientists have been testing just such a device on women with the bone-wasting disease osteoporosis.
The chip was inserted in their waist and activated by remote control.
A clinical trial, reported in Science Translational Medicine, showed the chip could administer the correct doses and that there were no side effects, according to BBC reports Thursday..."
Improving natural photosynthesis to make new fuels and boost crop production is the focus of new research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting today.
"The promise of synthetic biology lies in the creation of novel function from the proper combination of genetic elements. De novo gene synthesis has become a cost-effective method for building virtually any conceptualized genetic construct, removing the constraints of extant sequences, and greatly facilitating study of the relationships between gene sequence and function. With the rapid increase in the number and variety of characterized and cataloged genetic elements, tools that facilitate assembly of such parts into functional constructs (genes, vectors, circuits, etc.) are essential. The Gene Designer software allows scientists and engineers to readily manage and recombine genetic elements into novel assemblies. It also provides tools for the simulation of molecular cloning schemes as well as the engineering and optimization of protein-coding sequences. Together, the functions in Gene Designer provide a complete capability to design functional genetic constructs."
This is a video about Synthetic Biology. Its function is to give a little information to people about Synthetic Biology; so they can participate in the art-science official announcment: Bio-SintetizArte Website: http://2011.igem.org/Team:UNAM-Genomics_Mexico/Convocatoria
"We describe an autonomous DNA nanorobot capable of transporting molecular payloads to cells, sensing cell surface inputs for conditional, triggered activation, and reconfiguring its structure for payload delivery. The device can be loaded with a variety of materials in a highly organized fashion and is controlled by an aptamer-encoded logic gate, enabling it to respond to a wide array of cues. We implemented several different logical AND gates and demonstrate their efficacy in selective regulation of nanorobot function. As a proof of principle, nanorobots loaded with combinations of antibody fragments were used in two different types of cell-signaling stimulation in tissue culture. Our prototype could inspire new designs with different selectivities and biologically active payloads for cell-targeting tasks."
See also:DNA Nanorobots By Christina Agapakis | An awesome paper from Shawn Douglas, Ido Bachelet, and George Church at the Wyss Institute uses DNA origami to create nanorobots that can target and kill cancer cells in a population of healthy cells. Check out the video where the authors describe their work, or stories from Nature News and New Scientist. http://bit.ly/xGOIgj
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"Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, grew up on a farm in Nebraska where his father raised corn. He decided to apply his past to what he'd been doing for years, engineering microbes to produce chemicals. He's turned his attention to solving the world's energy crisis, using plants to engineer clean-burning fuels that will replace oil."
"Making faultless complex objects from potentially faulty building blocks is a fundamental challenge in computer engineering, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology. We developed an error-correcting recursive construction procedure that attempts to address this challenge. Making DNA molecules from synthetic oligonucleotides using the procedure described here surpasses existing methods for de novo DNA synthesis in speed, precision, and amenability to automation. It provides for the first time a unified DNA construction platform for combining synthetic and natural DNA fragments, for constructing designer DNA libraries, and for making the faultless long synthetic DNA building blocks needed for de novo genome construction."
"The International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition allows undergraduate teams to develop projects in synthetic biology within the context of a large, international Jamboree. Organizing and managing a successful iGEM team is an exercise in advanced agile project development. While many of the principles applicable to such teams are derived from management of agile software teams, iGEM presents several unique challenges."
"The technology within the GridION platform can now be miniaturised into a portable device for electronic single molecule sensing. This is possible because of recent advances made by Oxford Nanopore in using new polymers to form robust, long lasting bilayers on its proprietary arrayed sensing chip.
MinION is a disposable device that contains a sensor chip, ASIC and the fluidics system that are needed to perform a complete single molecule sensing experiment. Plugging directly into a laptop or desktop computer through a USB port, it is a self contained device to deliver real time experimental data.
The MinION is adaptable for DNA sequencing, protein sensing and other nanopore sensing techniques.
Workflows are similar to the GridION platform. Simple sample preparation and sensing experiments can be perfomed from complex samples such as blood or serum. The system can run with Accelrys' Pipeline Pilot or the user's own analysis systems in real time as the experiment is being performed."
My Twitter feed just exploded.Oxford Nanopore, long the sleeper project to watch in the field of mapping DNA, just announced two products that could dramatically change the field of DNA sequencing: a new DNA sequencer that may be able to handle a ...
Device identifies target then releases deadly payload.
"DNA origami, a technique for making structures from DNA, may be more than just a cool design concept. It can also be used to build devices that can seek out and destroy living cells.
The nanorobots, as the researchers call them, use a similar system to cells in the immune system to engage with receptors on the outside of cells.
DNA nanorobots can target cancer cells and deliver an antibody payload (purple). IMAGE CREATED BY CAMPBELL STRONG, SHAWN DOUGLAS, & GAËL MCGILL USING MOLECULAR MAYA & CADNANO “We call it a nanorobot because it is capable of some robotic tasks,” says Ido Bachelet, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the authors of the study, which is published in this week’s issue of Science1. Once the device recognizes a cell, he explains, it automatically changes its shape and delivers its cargo."
"Personalized cancer medicine is based on increased knowledge of the cancer mutation repertoire and availability of agents that target altered genes or pathways. Given advances in cancer genetics, technology, and therapeutics development, the timing is right to develop a clinical trial and research framework to move future clinical decisions from heuristic to evidence-based decisions. Although the challenges of integrating genomic testing into cancer treatment decision making are wide-ranging and complex, there is a scientific and ethical imperative to realize the benefits of personalized cancer medicine, given the overwhelming burden of cancer and the unprecedented opportunities for advancements in outcomes for patients."
"A great article and a very interesting person. - We can observe a paradigm change in science, and two computer developments are responsible. The first is the enormous storage capacity in the cloud. The second is that a huge number of computers have been connected and organized in social networks. These changes have resulted in huge quantities of data and complex systems, a problem normal science cannot solve. The traditional hypothesis method can deal with simple correlations between A and B. But the method fails if the problem becomes more complex with many factors. We moves from the hypothesis to a data driven research due to the huge data amounts we face. Contemporary science moves to a position, which sees thing together. Systems theory provide a concept for dealing with complex data amounts. Some groundbreaking work was done in the middle of the last century: 1948 – Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics or Control and communication in the animal and machine. 1955 – William Ross Ashby: Introduction to cybernetics. 1968 – Ludwig Bertalanffy: General System theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. Systems theory is already important in fields such as systems biology and its practical application synthetic biology. The data-driven science approach changes also the scientific method and results in a practice called "science 2.0" (named after web 2.0). The ideas of Stephen Friend are a logical consequence of this kind of development. A common data pool, which is open and free accessible is a prerequisite for this kind of science. Ref http://bit.ly/lMbKc8"
"Our popular undergraduate course — Build A Genome (BAG) just opens its 2012 spring session. We welcome 15 students from Johns Hopkins University, 22 students from Loyola University Maryland, and 2 Chinese scholars who traveled across the world from Tianjin University. Dr. Wenzheng Zhang and Wei Liu, representing Dr. Yingjin Yuan of the Department of Chemical Engineering, will be taking the course at JHU and then will return to Tianjin University to set up and help teach “Build-A-Genome China” in the fall of 2012. It is hoped that Build-A-Genome China will become a part of the regular curriculum for Chemical Engineering students, all of whom will there by be directly contributing to the International Sc2.0 project. This will be the first international appearance of the Build-A-Genome course, facilitated by a web-enabled international database portal to the BioStudio / Build-A-Genome Database, developed by Dr. Giovanni Stracquadanio of JHU. The new development of Build A Genome is an important component of a recent collaboration agreement on Synthetic Biology research and education between Johns Hopkins University and Tianjin University. Vice Provost for International Programs Pamela Cranston signed the agreement on behalf of Johns Hopkins University together with the President of Tianjin University, Dr. Jiajun Li in November, 2011."
"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 ..."
From nanotechnology to bio-engineering, emerging technologies hold the key to job creation in the United States....From nanotechnology to synthetic biology, these technologies are beginning to show their potential in the lab if not already in the market whether in sun block, planes or sports equipment.
"Big data biology-bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including 'omics'), and synthetic biology-raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data 'speak for themselves?' I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese's worry that "a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself." And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena."
"A successful immune response against pathogens requires the activation of different cell types of the immune system. These activation processes are difficult to study by classical biochemical and genetic methods alone. In this review we describe how approaches of synthetic biology, such as rebuilding of minimal functional signaling systems and the design of new molecules acting as signaling switches, can be used to get a deeper insight into the signaling mechanism of immune cells. In particular, the interaction of receptors with signal-transducing elements can be studied in detail with these new methods. In addition, sophisticated synthetic immune receptors are being tested in the clinic for gene therapy against certain cancer types."
"The promise of synthetic biology lies in the creation of novel function from the proper combination of genetic elements. De novo gene synthesis has become a cost-effective method for building virtually any conceptualized genetic construct, removing the constraints of extant sequences, and greatly facilitating study of the relationships between gene sequence and function. With the rapid increase in the number and variety of characterized and cataloged genetic elements, tools that facilitate assembly of such parts into functional constructs (genes, vectors, circuits, etc.) are essential. The Gene Designer software allows scientists and engineers to readily manage and recombine genetic elements into novel assemblies. It also provides tools for the simulation of molecular cloning schemes as well as the engineering and optimization of protein-coding sequences. Together, the functions in Gene Designer provide a complete capability to design functional genetic constructs."
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