This week a team of scientists published a study in Nature Biotechnology* explaining how they created an artificial jellyfish dubbed a ‘medusoid.’ Let’s be clear: scientists have not built a fully functional living jellyfish from scratch. Rather, they have constructed a thin, flower-shaped sheet of rat heart cells and silicone that mimics the swimming behavior [...]

Cheese is an everyday artifact of microbial artistry. Discovered accidentally when someone stored milk in a stomach-canteen full of gut microbes, acids, and enzymes thousands of years ago, cheesemaking evolved as a way to use good bacteria to protect milk from the bad bacteria that can make us sick, before anyone knew that bacteria even [...]

Bacteria may be single celled organisms but they very rarely exist as single cells on their own. Instead, bacteria form colonies made up of many cells, all growing and dividing together. These colonies are often ordered in shape and form and various physical systems have been created to model this self-organisation; for example small vibrating [...]

Each year, the iGEM competition encourages undergraduates from all over the world to create synthetic bacterial machines by organising modular pieces of genome. This is a guest post from the iGEM team in Buenos Aires about the competition and their project. We are happy to be presented as the first team from Argentina to participate [...]

This is a guest post from M. A. Loera Sánchez from the iGEM team UANL 2012. I have carried out a few small grammar edits but otherwise the essay is all his work, and I would like to thank him for the opportunity to host it on my blog. All references are below the main [...]

Bacteria will eat anything. Their highly diverse biochemistry, and ability to adapt quickly to change means that they can adapt to take up nutrients from a range of sources, including hot acid lakes and the interior of underground thermal vents. However bacteria also predate each other, and one particular bug, Micavibrio aeruginosavorus does this by [...]

Bacteria are capable of producing a wide range of exciting and important materials, and one of the most unusual is probably bacterial plastics. Used by the bacteria as an energy store, these bioplastics are of particular interest as not only could they be a non-oil-based form of plastic but they are also biodegradable. At the moment, they [...]

This is a guest post from a member of the iGEM competition team from Imperial College London. They recently won the iGEM regional championships and will be going to Boston in November to compete for the Worldwide Championships. This post describes the work they did over the summer, and how they found the iGEM experience. [...]

iGEM season is here and so to get into the spirit of things I thought I’d see if any interesting synthetic biology news had happened recently. It turns out that while I’ve been getting all excited about bacteria, people doing research on yeast have managed something pretty spectacular – they’ve replaced a whole section of [...]

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of the Carnival of Molecular Biology! Blog carnivals are collections of writing all about specific subjects, in the case of this carnival the fascinating world of the small and cellular. For the readers it provides a collection of quality blog posts, and for the bloggers it provides an opportunity to [...]

The biological world is getting smaller. When bacteria were first discovered they were no more than blobs, small intriguing shapes beneath the glass of a microscope. The development of more powerful microscopes and more detailed techniques started to unfold a whole new world of the very tiny. Nowadays the world explored by microbiologists is more detailed [...]

Engineers have invented a way to store a single rewriteable bit of data within the chromosome of a living cell—a kind of cellular switch that offers precise control over how and when genes are expressed. For three years, Jerome Bonnet, Pakpoom Subsoontorn, and Drew Endy of Stanford University tinkered with the switch in Escherichia coli [...]

Mark Gasson had caught a bad bug. Though he was not in pain, he was keenly aware of the infection raging in his left hand, knowing he could put others at risk by simply coming too close. But his virus wasn’t a risk for humans. Gasson, a cybernetics scientist at the University of Reading, was [...]

Just as bacteria and fungi are methodically breaking down the millions of gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, microbes might help us with another uncontrolled emission due to human activity—carbon dioxide. An anaerobic bacteria by the name of Clostridium ljungdahlii can ferment everything from sugars to simple mixtures of carbon dioxide and [...]

COLD SPRING, N.Y.— J. Craig Venter and his colleagues recently announced that they had created the first cell to run on a fully artificial genome. So what’s next for this synthetic strain of microscopic Mycoplasma mycoides and the new technology? The "synthetic cell" achievement has been lauded, condemned and undercut, but it has yet to [...]

What is the origin of life on Earth? What is the future of life in the age of synthetic biology? These are two of the biggest questions of contemporary biology, and the questions that drive Adam Rutherford’s new book, Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself, a compelling and accessible two-part look through the history [...]

Back in 2010 I was a teaching fellow for a group of undergraduates competing in the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition (iGEM) with a project on “personalized” genetic engineering of plants. We designed genetic modifications that would alter flavor, color, vitamin production, and the presence of allergens, so that a gardener could customize seeds to [...]

The language of innovation often stresses disruption–eliminating inefficient industries and replacing them with more streamlined, technologically advanced versions. Nowhere is disruption more complex and important than in the energy industry, with implications for so much of the way that we live, affecting global industry, economics, and climate. A major focus of synthetic biology today is [...]

This post originally appeared on the brand new Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc) Blog. Check it out for other new posts by Jay Keasling and Linda Kahl on intellectual property law and synthetic biology. —————— Synthetic biology is often referred to as “the field of the future,” the foundation of a third industrial revolution” [...]

There’s been a lot of interesting papers out this month in synthetic biology. Here’s a quick roundup of some news and research: Oliver Wright, Guy-Bart Stan and Tom Ellis. Building-in Biosafety for Synthetic Biology. Microbiology, March 2013. Preprint PDF available here. Christine Rabinovitch-Deer, John Oliver, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Shota Atsumi. Synthetic BIology and Metabolic Engineering [...]

In May of 2010, two influential Science papers changed the way that we think about the past and future of genomes. The decoding of the Neandertal genome showed that humans and Neandertals interbred some time before Neandertals went extinct some 30,000 years ago. A couple weeks later, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced their chemical [...]

The night before SB5.0 started, students and postdocs got together for the first ever Synthetic Biology Slam. Presenters had five minutes to talk about their vision of synthetic biology and their big idea for the future. One of my favorites was by Evan Clark, a member of the Brown-Stanford iGEM team and the Stanford spoken [...]

Here is a fantastic talk by historian of biology Luis Campos about the history of synthetic biology at the Bio:Fiction film festival in Vienna:

I’m a sucker for synthetic biology in non-traditional (non E. coli) model organisms, so I was pretty excited by the news of a recent paper on expanding the genetic code of a worm. “Worms!? With unnatural genes!?” you ask? Yes, and yes, (and yes, it’s a pretty awesome paper) but it’s actually probably simpler not [...]

Welcome! I’m thrilled to be joining this brand new blog network and to be part of this new collection of voices! Since I hate blogging about blogging I’m going to just jump right in, and what better place to start than right at the beginning? I work on synthetic biology, a mix of biology and [...]