SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute

Researchers Create Living 'Neon Signs' Composed of Millions of Glowing Bacteria...

"Although there has been considerable progress in the development of engineering principles for synthetic biology, a substantial challenge is the construction of robust circuits in a noisy cellular environment. Such an environment leads to considerable intercellular variability in circuit behaviour, which can hinder functionality at the colony level. Here we engineer the synchronization of thousands of oscillating colony ‘biopixels’ over centimetre-length scales through the use of synergistic intercellular coupling involving quorum sensing within a colony and gas-phase redox signalling between colonies. We use this platform to construct a liquid crystal display (LCD)-like macroscopic clock that can be used to sense arsenic via modulation of the oscillatory period. Given the repertoire of sensing capabilities of bacteria such as Escherichia coli, the ability to coordinate their behaviour over large length scales sets the stage for the construction of low cost genetic biosensors that are capable of detecting heavy metals and pathogens in the field."

"News out of Washington at year-end included an announcement from the Department of Energy (DOE) concerning a breakthrough at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in which scientists have developed a methodology for creating “RNA machines” which can be used to enhance or express certain characteristics in a living organism.

This new capability is initially being used at JBEI to modify e-coli bacteria in such a way as to make them more efficient in their digestion of switchgrass, allowing them to convert released sugars into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel at lower cost...."

On Jan. 24th, the Senate is expected to pass a bill for the first ever U.S. internet censorship system. While the Senate is holding town halls and meetings at home, they need to hear why they need to block the vote and kill this bill. - Innovative science needs an open free internet! The economic future of the USA depend on it!

"The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products affects the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through the resulting phenotype. In this regard, contemporary genomes can be used as molecular records that reveal associations of various genes working in their natural lifestyles. By analyzing thousands of orthologs across ~600 bacterial species, we constructed a map of gene-gene co-occurrence across much of the sequenced biome. If genes preferentially co-occur in the same organisms, they were called herein correlogs; in the opposite case, called anti-correlogs. To quantify correlogy and anti-correlogy, we alleviated the contribution of indirect correlations between genes by adapting ideas developed for reverse engineering of transcriptional regulatory networks. Resultant correlogous associations are highly enriched for physically interacting proteins and for co-expressed transcripts, clearly differentiating a subgroup of functionally-obligatory protein interactions from conditional or transient interactions. Other biochemical and phylogenetic properties were also found to be reflected in correlogous and anti-correlogous relationships. Additionally, our study elucidates the global organization of the gene association map, in which various modules of correlogous genes are strikingly interconnected by anti-correlogous crosstalk between the modules. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of such associations along different domains of life and environmental microbial communities. These phylogenetic profiling approaches infer functional coupling of genes regardless of mechanistic details, and may be useful to guide exogenous gene import in synthetic biology."