Topic “engineering”
NY Times profiles hardscrabble iGEM team from SF
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:
SynBERC bioengineers launch world's first biological design-build facilty
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.
Team produces valuable chemicals from microbes
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.
Researchers engineer microbes to produce fuel from biomass
A team of researchers from SynBERC, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and biotech firm LS9 has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.
Second wave of synthetic biology
A Nature review article by Priscilla Purnick and new SynBERC investigator Ron Weiss offers a peek at how synbio research might shape up. The authors assert that, until now, the field has focused on the non-trivial challenge of combining basic elements (promoters, RBSs, repressors, etc.) into functional and robust modules (switches, pulse generators, cascades, etc.). These efforts have allowed control over the “central dogma” of cellular function (transcription, translation, and post-translational control).
How do you make gasoline from microbes? Ask the Voigt lab
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.
Scaffold boosts mevalonate yield 77-fold
In the August 2009 edition of Nature Biotechnology, SynBERC researcher John Dueber and company show how they engineered synthetic protein scaffolds to recruit metabolic enzymes in a manner that greatly improves production of an end-product while lowering the overall metabolic load on the chassis organism. The principle behind such metabolic pipelines is simple: Assemble enzyme complexes so that active sites are close together in order to prevent loss of intermediates and competition from other pathways.
Course development
SynBERC aims to educate a new cadre of synthetic biologists at the post-doctoral, Ph.D., and B.S. level. SynBERC investigators at both the East Coast and West Coast hubs have developed upper division undergraduate and lower-division graduate level courses that are now being taught.
Double inversion switch enables smarter cells with lasting memory
On the path toward sophisticated cellular computation, synthetic biologists are constantly seeking better ways to program logic into cells. One way to do this is using DNA segments known as inversion recombination elements. In essence, these inversion elements act like binary switches that can write ones and zeroes directly into DNA. In the July 30, 2008, issue of PLOS, SynBERC researchers Timothy Ham, Sung Kuk Lee, Jay Keasling and Adam Arkin demonstrate how engineers can combine two or more such elements together to design complex logical systems in DNA.
