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.

Graduate students Jeffrey Dietrich, Howard Chou, and Eric Steen from the Keasling lab, as well as Angela Won from the Lim lab, participated in the 2009 Idea to IPO class offered by the Center for BioEntrepreneurship at the University of California San Francisco.

SynBERC, Life Technologies and other SynBERC Industrial Partners have tentatively planned a workshop on Yeast Synthetic Biology Tools. The workshop, tentatively scheduled for November 14 at UCSF’s Mission Bay Campus, arose from conversations among several SynBERC and IAB members over the past several months around a common interest in yeast synthetic biology tools development and application.

Work is beginning on an industry-inspired testbed that aims to construct an advanced fermentation organism. Led by Chris Voigt, the new testbed aims to apply research from the SynBERC thrusts (parts, devices, chassis) to the construction of a “smart” strain that can be programmed to sense and respond to conditions encountered during a fermentation. The focus will be on the construction of a generic system that is applicable to many potential pathways. E. coli has been chosen as the model system because of the availability of platform parts/devices and genome replacement tools.

In April 2009, Ginkgo Bioworks announced its first product in partnership with New England Biolabs — a BioBrick™ Assembly Kit designed to make part assembly a snap.

The Student Leadership Council (SLC) had its third industry visit in coincidence with the Fall Retreat at MIT on September 14, 2009. Kevin Madden of Microbia (http://www.microbia.com) generously offered to host us for a company tour and presentation/Q&A.  Microbia is a leader in industrial biotechnology to create renewable sources of products that either displace petrochemical-derived chemicals, or create novel biomaterials with commercially desirable properties.

In collaboration with multimedia designers from the Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, the San Francisco Exploratorium, as well as with researchers in the synthetic biology community, SynBERC researchers Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett are designing and development of a web-based multimedia platform for public understanding and critical debate of synthetic biology: Ars Synthetica.

The Washington Post's Rick Weiss surveys the field of synthetic biology as researchers prepare to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA. Fifty years ago, researchers began stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together in test tubes to make life's most extraordinary molecule. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up" like software downloaded from the Internet, then cajole the cell to do its bidding.

Jay Keasling and Drew Endy were selected from among the world’s top researchers in nanoscience, physics, biology, materials science, and engineering to participate in the Kavli Futures Symposium held in Ilulissat, Greenland in June 2007. The symposium’s purpose was to bring top researchers together to share their expertise and brainstorm on the new field of synthetic biology.

On August 7, 2007, SynBERC hosted a delegation of twelve university and industry leaders from Colombia to explore how synthetic biology can be used to help Colombian industries, and how our educational resources can be used to develop graduate and undergraduate curricula in the emerging field of synthetic biology for all of Latin America.