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 [...]

Bacteria are single celled organisms that can do amazing things in multicellular groups, with complex coordinated behaviors emerging from the interaction of genetic networks, chemical environments, and the physics of cell growth. Last year I wrote about the work of Tim Rudge and Fernan Federici and their incredible images of bacterial growth patterns. Their paper, [...]

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 Salton Sea is California’s largest lake, stretching 35 miles along the San Andreas fault about 150 miles east of Los Angeles and 200 feet below sea level. It is surrounded by harsh desert as well as productive agricultural land irrigated by water from the Colorado River and draining back into the Sea. The Salton [...]

Last month’s UCLA-Leonardo Art|Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) included a fabulous lightning talk from Seri Robinson, a professor of wood anatomy at Oregon State University and a wood artist. She works with wood colored by fungal pigments, exploring the interactions between different species as they grow and bump in to each other to leave behind beautiful [...]

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 [...]

Megan Daalder‘s Project Eureka is a shape-shifting and multidimensional narrative about life, science, and technology after the end of the world. At her work-in-progress exhibition at the UCLA Art|Science gallery, which opened this week, she invites us to visit Eureka’s future, set in the year 2050. In this future “the ‘Naturals’ have won,” and society [...]

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” [...]

I’m fascinated by the biology of soil and the history of “dirtiness”–where dirt and bacteria are allowed to be and where we must clean them away. Mary Douglas defines dirt in her classic book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo as “matter out of place”: [Dirt] is a relative idea. [...]

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 [...]