In the March 14 2008 issue of Science, a team of UC San Francisco scientists led by SynBERC Deputy Director Wendell Lim show how a toolkit of modular molecular components and circuit boards can be used to engineer a wide variety of biochemical circuits in living cells, much as the old Heathkit electronic kits of the 1950s enabled students and hobbyists to assemble modular electronic parts into working radios and computers. “This work tells us a lot about the organization of biological circuits,” says Lim, “and how the complex and diverse molecular circuits that we find in living cells might have evolved in a rather simple stepwise manner.” Even though the circuits are fairly simple, the work has implications for engineering cells, according to Lim. “It shows that we can rationally modify cellular kinase circuits.” Full article -> (subscription required)
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| Figure A: Early in the electronics era, hobbyists and students used kits consisting of circuit boards and electronic components to build diverse devices. Figure B: UCSF scientists have invented an analogous approach that may enable the custom reprogramming of cells for diverse therapeutic and biotechnological applications. In this kinase circuit, the protein labeled as “scaffold” acts as the molecular circuit board. |
Seeking to microbially produce a key ingredient in malaria treatments, the nonprofit pharmaceutical company Institute for OneWorld Health, together with synthetic biology innovator Amyris Biotechnologies and pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis have formed a partnership. Under the terms of the agreement, the three will work jointly to develop and design pilot and commercial scale manufacturing processes, with the goal of introducing low-cost, semisynthetic artemisinin and artemisinin-based combination therapies in 2010. The project uses technology from the Keasling laboratory at UC Berkeley and developed through a $43M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Using a large number of re-usable parts and a novel intellectual property model, the venture represents one of the largest synthetic biology projects to date. Read more from the Wall Street Journal ->
 SynBERC students from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley were among the finalists in this year's International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition, sponsored by SynBERC and hosted at MIT. Of the 57 teams from universities around the world, UCSF and UCB were selected as two of only 6 finalists. The feat was all the more amazing since the two teams were composed all or in part of high school students, whereas their competitors were mostly undergraduate students. The UCSF team, composed entirely of biotechnology students from Lincoln High School in San Francisco, designed a “synthesome”, an artificial cellular organelle to house biological factories. The UC Berkeley team, composed of undergraduates and an experimental sub group of two high students and their teacher, designed "bactoblood", a blood substitute that could be freeze-dried. The iGEM program develops high school and undergraduate students’ skills and confidence as research scientists, develops graduate students’ skills in mentoring and teaching, exposes US student researchers to researchers from around the world, and furthers the goals of the synthetic biology community by increasing open-source resources.
More about SynBERC iGEM teams:
NY Times: English, Algebra, Phys Ed ... and Biotech
San Francisco Chronicle: High school biowizards break new ground in winning competition
UCSF Today: UCSF's all-high school team
 SynBERCer and "alpha synthusiast" Drew Endy has accepted a faculty position at Stanford's bioengineering department, set up in 2002. Endy is the first professor hired there who focuses on synthetic biology. The Stanford job will bring Endy back to the Bay Area after five and a half years at MIT. (Bound in part by SynBERC, the Bay Area and Boston are the two largest U.S. centers of synthetic biology activity.) Before heading for Cambridge, Endy helped start the Molecular Sciences Institute, an independent nonprofit biological research lab in Berkeley. It was there that Endy began to tackle the engineering challenge of managing the complexities of living cells. At Stanford, Drew will continue to help build the collaborative social environment that is accelerating the emerging field of synthetic biology, a feat for which he is perhaps best known.
Read the full story on SFGate ->
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. Weiss's peice includes expert analysis from SynBERCers Paul Rabinow, Drew Endy, Tom Knight, and Jay Keasling.
Read the full story at The Washington Post ->
In a feature on the Best and Brightest scientific thinkers of 2007, Chris Jones profiles SynBERCer Drew Endy in the November 20 2007 edition of Esquire on how he "and a few other pioneers of synthetic biology are starting to intervene in evolution and put it to work for us." Did Drew really declare some kind of nerdcore-gangsta-rap-war against Berkeley? Also mentioned in the article are SynBERCers Jay Keasling, Tom Knight, and George Church.
More evidence that synthetic biology is seeping into pop culture: George Church and Jay Keasling earn the dubious distinction of making Newsweek Magazine's list of the 10 Hottest Nerds. The NSF was not appropriately cited in the article as the funding source - we are working to correct this.
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. At the conclusion of the symposium, participants signed a two-page statement calling for an international effort to advance synthetic biology that would not only propel research, but do so while developing protective measures against accidents and abuses of synthetic biology. “The early twenty-first century is a time of tremendous promise and tremendous peril.” the two-page statement says. It calls for an international effort to advance synthetic biology that would not only propel research, but also develop protective measures against accidents and abuses of synthetic biology.
Two SynBERC scientists have
been recognized by Technology
Review magazine as among the
world's top innovators under age
35. J. Christopher Anderson
was chosen for designing tumor-killing
bacteria, while Kristala
Jones Prather was chosen for
developing a promising reverse-engineering
strategy for synthesizing
commercial molecules
biologically. The annual "TR35"
list was announced on August 15
by Technology Review, the oldest
technology magazine in the world
and a publication of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
(MIT). The 35 innovators on the
list were selected from more
than 300 nominees as examples
of "the spirit of innovation in
business, technology and the
arts."
 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. As a result, SynBERC and the Colombian delegates are developing a Memorandum of Understanding that outlines agreed-upon best practices for fostering a cooperative research environment among members. SynBERC will begin to share its developing synthetic biology curriculum to with our Colombian partners to help inspire students to pursue science careers in the emerging field of synthetic biology and its related disciplines. In addition, three Colombian companies have pledged to join SynBERC’s formal Industry Alliance Program. A number of other companies from Colombia, Chile and Argentina are now interested in joining SynBERC, paving the way for a broader Latin American component to SynBERC's industry alliance. The partnership promises to bring synthetic biology advances to Colombia’s water and food processing industries, and provide new opportunities to young researchers in Latin America.
In their November 2005 article Environmentally Controlled Invasion of Cancer Cells by Engineered Bacteria, SynBERC researhers Chris Anderson, Adam Arkin, and Chris Voigt describe a method for engineering the interaction between bacteria and cancer cells to depend on heterologous environmental signals. The authors point how how the approach could be used to engineer bacteria to sense the microenvironment of a tumor and respond by invading cancerous cells and releasing a cytotoxic agent (see SynBERC's Tumor-Killing Bacterium Testbed for more info). The article was one of the 10 Top Downloaded articles in Journal of Molecular Biology for 2006, suggesting enormous interest and value to researchers in the field of synthetic biology.
Keasling named Discover Magazine's Scientist of the Year
 For his breakthroughs in the field of synthetic biology, including treatments for malaria, AIDS, and cancer as well as
discoveries of new fuel resources, Discover Magazine awarded SynBERC Director Jay Keasling with its Scientist of the Year
award on November 15th. Bob Guccione, Jr., CEO of Discover media, says, “Dr. Keasling is a visionary whose ingenuity
merits special recognition. Discover believes what separates Dr. Keasling from other scientists, who also have done
groundbreaking work, is his spirit and his determination to help those who cannot help themselves. He is a true
humanitarian.” Read the UC Berkeley press release
Christopher
Voigt named to TR35
 Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored
the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most
exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists
and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine,
computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is
changing our world. Synthetic biologist Christopher
Voigt has created an unusual image: the Virgin Mary on a lawn of
E. coli. In turning microbes into a "photographic" medium,
Voigt and his team have illustrated his approach to synthetic biology:
creating genetic parts that can be used interchangeably to achieve
different results. They hooked a light receptor from blue-green
algae to a protein that normally controls E. coli genes' response
to the cell's surroundings.
 Fast, cheap and somewhat in control
Adam Arkin and Daniel Fletcher
30 August 2006
Genome Biology
online here (subscription
required)
Efforts to manipulate living organisms have raised the question
of whether engineering principles of hierarchy, abstraction and
design can be applied to biological systems. Here, we consider
the practical challenges to controlling living organisms that must
be surmounted, or at least managed, if synthetic biology and cellular
bioengineering are to be productive.
 Biologists
Are Looking To the Chip Industry For Production Models
(Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006)
Read
the full pdf article ->
The car only became popular in America after Henry Ford figured out
how to mass produce it. Computers didn't invade every office and
den until the chip industry learned how to churn out endless billions
of the semiconductors that do all of a PC's actual work. Now, the
world's life-science researchers are taking a page from those two
industrial playbooks and are trying to make biological production
as efficient as most other sorts in modern economies.
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Anderson, Arkin, Voigt paper on ScienceDirect's Top 10 Most Downloaded of 2006