September 16, 2019
(CNN) – Genes and genomes are based on code– just like the digital language of computers. But instead of zeros and ones, four DNA letters — A, C, T, G — encode all of life. (Life is messy, and there … Read More
July 10, 2019
(STAT News) – Scientists at the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention have created a synthetic version of the Ebola virus circulating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, part of an effort to determine whether diagnostic tests and experimental … Read More
June 19, 2019
Science and Engineering Ethics (vol. 24, no. 6, 2018) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “The Food Warden: An Exploration of Issues in Distributing Responsibilities for Safe-by-Design Synthetic Biology Applications” by Zoë Robaey, Shannon L. Spruit, and Ibo … Read More
May 16, 2019
(STAT News) – The bacteria happily eating and reproducing and respiring in little plastic dishes sprinkled with nutrient broth in Jason Chin’s lab outside London look ordinary enough, but they differ in a fundamental way from every other living thing … Read More
May 2, 2019
(GEN) – The rapidly developing field of synthetic biology—including the subfield of synthetic immunology—is putting a plethora of new tools into the hands of basic and translational scientists and enabling new technologies that are transforming molecular biology and medicine. Chimeric … Read More
April 18, 2019
(New Atlas) – The CRISPR gene-editing system is usually known for helping scientists treat genetic diseases, but the technology has a whole range of possible uses in synthetic biology too. Now researchers at ETH Zurich have used CRISPR to build … Read More
April 4, 2019
(The Economist) – TO UNDERSTAND BIOLOGY, synthetic or otherwise, you have to understand how proteins are made. Proteins, which carry out almost all the basic functions of life, from respiration to reproduction, are all made of 20 smaller molecules strung … Read More
April 4, 2019
(New Atlas) – Scientists at ETH Zurich have created the first fully computer-generated genome of a living organism. The brand new genome, named Caulobacter ethensis-2.0, was built by essentially cleaning up and simplifying the natural code of a bacterium called … Read More
March 11, 2019
(NPR) – The bacteria Reeder is helping test are part of a new field of medical research that has emerged from two realms of biomedical science. One is the study of the human microbiome, the microbes that inhabit our bodies. … Read More
March 6, 2019
(Chemical & Engineering News) – Molecular computer systems that rely on strands of DNA to process information can already solve math problems, play games like tic-tac-toe, and detect the biochemical signatures of disease. Now researchers have used artificial cells to … Read More
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