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
February 27, 2019
(The Atlantic) – Fermentation-powered brewing has been getting people drunk for thousands of years. Soon, it could be getting them high, too. In research announced on Wednesday by the University of California at Berkeley, a team of synthetic biologists has … Read More
February 26, 2019
(Nature) – For decades, biologists have built custom DNA sequences chemically, from phosphoramidite building blocks that replicate natural bases. But the method is impractical beyond 200 bases, and environmentally hazardous. New enzymatic strategies could circumvent those limitations.
January 31, 2019
(Nature) – Biologists the world over routinely pay companies to synthesize snippets of DNA for use in the laboratory or clinic. But intelligence experts and scientists alike have worried for years that bioterrorists could hijack such services to build dangerous … Read More
Recommended Reading
