What ideas would you come up with if you hung out with a molecular biologist, a mechanical engineer, a computer programmer and an artist - and happened to be sitting next to a lab?
It was a night of culture - yoghurt cultures. Vaughn Tan shared his passion for yoghurt with about two dozen captivated future yoghurt makers. He spoke about the biochemistry and microbial ecology of the process - ways to optimize the proteins in the milk, effects of inoculation temperatures, the activities of the different bacterial populations in the culture.
..... The Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center is partnering with DIYbio.org, on a project to ensure safety within the rapidly expanding community of amateur biologists.....
The NSF-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) has made exceptional inroads this year in the effort to train a new generation of synthetic biologists by developing and launching a series of courses at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. The courses reflect not just the scientific and engineering goals of the field, but also its social and ethical dimensions. Some of these courses are available outside the host university through online modules at openwetware.org, and a course on the Fundamentals of Synthetic Biology was taught at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, Korea. SynBERC is headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley.
Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson identifies two kinds of scientific revolutions, those driven by new concepts (theoretical), and those driven by new tools (technological).
An arduino is hooked up to measure the voltage created inside a Keegotech microbial fuel cell. Some of the soil microbes in the MFC become electrogenic in anaerobic conditions, and the MFC collects electrons from them.
Synthetic biology received about $430 million in U.S. government funding from 2005 to 2010, far outpacing European governments, which gave their synthetic biologists $160 million over the same period. The emerging field received nearly no funding before 2005, according to a new Woodrow Wilson Center report.
WASHINGTON, DC — A new analysis by the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center found that the U.S. government has spent around $430 million on research related to synthetic biology since 2005, with the Department of Energy funding a majority of the research. By comparison, the analysis indicated that the European Union and three individual European countries – the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Germany – had spent approximately $160 million during that same period.
..... A Boston company selected to receive $6 million is Ginkgo BioWorks, which seeks to engineer the E. coli bacterium to harness electric current to convert carbon dioxide and water into isooctane, a component of gasoline, the department said......
The creation of a new life form is the highest for humans. That he went level with the many gods that human culture is rich. Nothing wrong with that so. Or right? As sensational stories prevail in the discussion on synthetic life is becoming louder the call for control and risk mitigation of a research field with many fantastic potential.
Synthetic Biology is a relatively new field, where biology and engineering combine to achieve new biological functions and systems not found in nature. Previous TU Delft teams have won several medals. The pressure is high to uphold that ...