Can’t keep a ginkgo tree down, apparently.
On a completely unrelated note, if you use restriction enzymes as much as we do this recent paper in NAR we came across will be pretty useful to you – The Fidelity Index provides a systematic quantitation of star activity of DNA restriction endonucleases (Wei et al, from NEB, freely available).
Carl Zimmer on his Discover Magazine blog predicts that Obama’s choice of Steve Chu as Energy Secretary will be a boon for synthetic biology. We hope so!
Here’s a link to a video of Steve’s talk at the Synthetic Biology 2.0 conference at Berkeley in 2006 (RealPlayer needed, unfortunately). You can find the videos from the other talks at SB2.0 here.
The always interesting Seed Magazine reports on the work of Mac Cowell and DIYBio to bring biology to the masses. In a long interview, Mac lays out his vision of how amateurs can contribute to biological research in a similar manner to how amateur computer scientists were, and continue to be, so influential in (silicon-based) computer programming.
As an added bonus, Seed also contains an article written by Ginkgo’s own Jason Kelly about the evolution of genetic engineering from the very first recombinant DNA experiments through to the iGEM competition today. He highlights the renewed sense of excitement and possibility about responsible and constructive engineering of biology. Much of this excitement stems from the enthusiasm, talent (and dance skills) of the iGEM teams.
Well, time for me to make an appearance on the blog. Now that Barry has added authorship, my delinquence has become obvious. Just wanted to flag a New York Times article about bringing back Mammoths. One of my favorite synthetic biologists – George Church has some interesting comments in the article. On a side note, I recommend catching one of George’s talks if you have a chance – be sure to look out for the spinning tRNA (if you don’t see it at some point in the talk, you might be watching an imposter):
The approach George recommends is starting with the genome of a close relative of the Mammoth such as the African Elephant and then making the necessary changes to convert the elephant genome to match the recently sequenced Mammoth genome. The elephant/mammoth egg could then (possibly) be brought to term by an African Elephant. Development is a pretty robust process, so maybe it would work.
He also describes a new technology out of his lab that might be able to automate the large number of genome changes needed to pull off such a feat. I suspect he’s talking in part about the good work described in this patent application by one of his graduate students (and another of my favorite synthetic biologists) Harris Wang.
George also mentions that making zoos better isn’t as high on his list as addressing major world problems like the energy crisis. I agree with that, though I have to say that de-extincting species isn’t too far down there.
An exposé of the discrimination and prejudice rampant in tomato society.
(Photo originally uploaded by leungski)
Sorry to get this post up somewhat late, the afternoon has been somewhat hectic. Slovenia once again had an extremely strong project and in the opinion of the judges were deserving of the grand prize.
Slovenia developed some very nice vaccine technology to fight Helicobacter pylori. The first part of the project was to engineer a live Helicobacter strain that expresses an antigen to trigger both the innate and adaptive immune response. The second half of the project involved engineering a constitutively active variant of TLR (toll-like receptor) to remove the requirement for receptor agonists. The latter has the potential to be a novel general strategy for developing vaccines.
Congratulations also to Freiburg and Caltech who were first and second runner’s up respectively.
Thanks are due to the organizers and the judges for such a well-organized weekend.
(The image above shows some of the crowd during the award ceremony and Tom Richard, head judge, bathed in light).
Quick update. Last night the judges whittled down the teams to six finalists. They are all presenting once more this morning before the grand prize winner is awarded.
The finalists are – Berkeley, Caltech, Slovenia, NYMU Taipei, Freiburg, and Harvard.
Berkeley just did a great job and Caltech is up next…
Stay tuned.
(not genetically encoded)
Turns out that being a judge requires one to actually be a judge rather than write blog posts. Grabbing a few minutes to write a post while a somewhat nervous team peppers their presenter with questions to make sure they are ready to give the talk.
The second session this morning was very interesting. Princeton is attempting to implement logical circuits at the level of neuronal cells. They described an implementation of a bistable switch made up of two neuronal cells and a pacemaker cell. Very neat. I also really enjoyed the Taipei team who are working to engineer commensal E. coli to act as a bacterial dialysis machine. It’s a big project that is going to take a lot of work but they have laid out what needs to get done very nicely.
It’s 10.30am on Saturday morning and I’ve been to two meetings and three talks so far today. iGEM must have started.
One of my meetings was the pre-game meeting for judges. Great to see how seriously the judges are taking the job of judging 80 diverse teams all of whom are giving oral presentations and posters over the course of 8 hours. Tom and Drew, the head judges have done a really nice job of putting a system in place to ensure everyone is judged fairly. The 35 judges have a long day ahead of them…
I’ll be covering the health and medicine track today. We’ve already had the chance to see Calgary talking about engineering bugs to sense and kill pathogens in hosts, Strasbourg gave a nice presentation about their work to build a binary cell division counter in yeast, and finally University of Chicago presented their work to express sticky proteins (normally only made in mussels) in heterologous hosts such as E. coli and Caulobacter. Of note, two of the three teams I saw this morning were first-time teams. iGEM growth continues to be impressive.
On to the next session…
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