SynBERC researchers at Harvard are a step closer to engineering new "words" in the DNA language of bacteria by co-opting one of the codons in its genetic code to give it new meaning. In the July 15 2011 edition of Science, George Church's group describes its genome engineering technologies that are capable of fundamentally reengineering genomes by expanding the number of DNA codons it can read.

Small-molecule regulation of gene expression is intrinsic to cellular function and indispensable to the construction of new biological sensing, control and expression systems. However, there are currently only a handful of strategies for engineering such regulatory components and fewer still that can give rise to an arbitrarily large set of inducible systems whose members respond to different small molecules, display uniformity and modularity in their mechanisms of regulation, and combine to actuate universal logics.

SynBERC investigators Drew Endy and Vivek Mutalik represented the SynBERC BIOFAB: International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology at the BIO Pacific Rim Summit on December 12, 2010 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The very specialized workshop on advancements in synthetic biology was open to all attendees of the large annual meeting focused on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy.

Terry Johnson, UC Berkeley BioengineeringUC Berkeley's top-ranked Bioengineering Department announced the creation of a Synthetic Biology concentration in Bioengineering. The concentration represents one of the few US degree specializations in synthetic biology.

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.

The Yeast Synthetic Biology Workshop took place on Saturday October 16, 2010 at UC San Francisco's Genentech Hall. Generously supported by Life Technologies, this one-day workshop was in response to a growing recognition that yeast is re-emerging as an important workhorse system in synthetic biology research-development-production processes, in particular for chemical production and biofuels applications.

The New York Times is running a long piece on one team's efforts in the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition at MIT:

With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SynBERC bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

SynBERC investigator Chris Voigt and a group of graduate students from his lab took a leap forward in the pursuit of chemicals derived not from petroleum but from renewable sources. The chemical target was methyl halides, a chemical precursor to several high-value chemicals, and which the oil industry already knows how to derive gasoline from.