| Synthetic
biology on Wikipedia.org
A primer
on synthetic biology from the Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written
collaboratively by volunteers and
operated by the non-profit Wikimedia
Foundation.
Time Magazine talks with Jay Keasling
Jay
Keasling's research on creating synthetic versions
of plant products is currently featured in the online edition of Time
Magazine. His work in this area has been widely covered by the news
media, particularly his efforts to create a low-cost treatment for malaria.
Go here to
read the article.
Berkeley iGEM 2005
The intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) involves teams
from 13 colleges, comprised mostly of undergraduates, that worked over
the summer towards the not-so-modest goal of “designing
and building the ‘coolest’ systems from standard, interchangeable
biological parts and to operate those systems in living cells.” Students
used genetic engineering to coax bacteria to perform a wide variety
of tasks. This year's iGEM
Jamboree took
place at MIT on November 5-6, 2005. Berkeley's
team is working on Addressable
Bacterial Communication. Read the Bio-IT article -->
Intelligent
Design
by Alan Moses of the Berkeley
Science Review
This
article about the "end of the beginning" of biology"
looks at what it means now that biology has entered a new phase that
includes the possibility of biological design.
"May We Make the World?" Bioethicist
Laurie Zoloth on synthetic biology
Dr. Zoloth came to Berkeley on April 19, 2005, as part of the Synthetic
Biology Seminar Series to discuss bioethical aspects of synthetic
biology. Dr.
Zoloth's talk is now available online (RealMedia Player required).
Dr. Zoloth is Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities, and of Religion,
at Northwestern University, and Director of Bioethics for Northwestern's
Center for Genetic Medicine. More
about Dr. Zoloth -->
Synthetic
biology offers alternative pathway to natural products
A review article in Nature by Stephan Herrera
Malaria,
Science, and Social Responsibility
In the magazine The Scientist, writer Bennett Daviss reports
on how our nonprofit drug-development partnership seeks to cure the ills
of developing nations. (login required)
New
York Times reports on battle against malaria
Donald G. McNeil, Jr. reports how researchers like Jay Keasling are fighting
to save millions of lives by creating next-generation malaria drugs via
synthetic biology. The January 25, 2005 article explains the challenges
of creating the perfect medicine, which must be "powerful enough
to kill a parasite that can twist a capillary-surfing red blood cell into
a clotted lump, but still safe enough to give to a malnourished child
whose hospital is a mud hut and whose nurse is a fretful mother who cannot
read." Keasling and others are racing to bring the high-tech drugs
to the developing world at a mere 25 cents per treatment, while malaria
becomes increasingly resistant to current treatments. NY
Times article (login required) -->
Making
a miracle affordable
In this three-minute video produced by UC Berkeley, Jay Keasling describes
his technique for producing the miracle anti-malarial drug artemisinin
in a way that is inexpensive enough for the world's poor.
Life,
Reinvented: Wired Magazine reports on synthetic biology
Wired Magazine highlights MIT's efforts to realize the potential
of synthetic biology.
Enhancing
Adult Stem Cell Utility
Adult stem cells carry neither the controversy nor the cachet of embryonic
stem cells, but research on the older cells is often clouded by the conflict
over their younger cousins. Now, David Schaffer — a UC Berkeley
bioengineer and Synthetic Biology design team
member— has devised a way to enhance the utility of adult stem cells
that could steal some of the spotlight away from embryonic stem cells
and eventually lead to treatments or cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's
and Parkinson's.
Microbes
Made to Order subscription required
The journal Science points to ours as "the world's first
synthetic biology department" and describes what the fledgling field
holds in store.
Inaugural Synthetic Biology Conference
Massachussetts Institute of Technology, June 10-12, 2004
Metabolic
Engineering for Drug Discovery and Development subscription
required
Jay Keasling and Chaitan Khosla describe in the December 2003 issue of
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery how metabolic engineering has been
defined as the redirection of metabolic pathways using genetic manipulation.
Since the emergence of metabolic engineering science in the early 1980s,
the field has made notable strides not only at a conceptual level, but
also with regard to translating these concepts into practical products
and processes. Today, metabolic engineering plays an important role in
the generation of fuels from renewable resources, the conversion of agricultural
raw materials (for example, corn syrup) into bulk and specialty chemicals,
and the discovery, development and scale-up of therapeutically useful
products. This article focuses on recent advances in the last category.
Specifically, we review the impact that converging developments in genetic
engineering and biosynthetic chemistry are having on natural-product drug
discovery.
A
partnership between biology and engineering subscription
required
This October 2004 commentary by Roger Brent in Nature Biotechnology
explores the potentially beneficial outcomes of a partnership between
systems biology and synthetic biology. This assessment is a challenge
due to the vague definition and unrealistic claims made for systems biology,
as well as by the lack of an explicitly stated distinction between synthetic
biology and the engineering of biological systems practiced since the
development of recombinant DNA. Here, I suggest that one might be able
to add meaning to the concept of systems biology by remembering older
conceptions of experimental systems. In biology, the original word used
for the study of system function is physiology. It may be possible in
the near term to understand the quantitative physiology of certain intracellular
systems. I then try to determine the distinguishing attributes of synthetic
biology. Any body of theory and experimental capability that enables quantitative
prediction of a system's behavior will be applicable to synthetic biology
in that it will enable prediction of the behavior of human-designed biological
artifacts before those are instantiated in DNA code. If the practitioners
are honest with one another about the limits of their abilities, this
intersection of science and engineering can spur the development of both.
Act
natural subscription required
In the January 9 2003 issue of Nature, Steven Benner offers this
view on how the burgeoning field of synthetic biology aims to reproduce
advanced, dynamic behaviors of biological systems, including genetics,
inheritance and evolution. Building systems with a bottom-up approach
should offer a new way to learn about genetic, regulatory and metabolic
systems in general.
From
molecular to modular biology subscription
required
In the December 1999 issue of Nature, Andrew Murray and colleagues describe
how cellular functions, such as signal transmission, are carried out by
'modules' made up of many species of interacting molecules. Understanding
how modules work has depended on combining phenomenological analysis with
molecular studies. General principles that govern the structure and behaviour
of modules may be discovered with help from synthetic sciences such as
engineering and computer science, from stronger interactions between experiment
and theory in cell biology, and from an appreciation of evolutionary constraints.
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