When the physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, he left a note on his blackboard that read, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Feynman may have been reflecting on the nature of scientific understanding, but the sentiment also reflects the spirit of synthetic biology. That scientific field is all about deconstructing and precisely manipulating biological processes to test our grasp of them. “Everyone in synthetic biology loves that quote,” said Patrick Shih, a synthetic plant biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s pretty much the central tenet.”

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2022-09-28

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Quantamacazine

Sugar uptake mechanism understanding may have implications for biorefineries. With the help of genetic manipulation and advanced biophysical tools, an international research team has gained unexpected insight into how a bacterium uptakes sugars derived from plant feedstock. Their findings were published on Sept. 7 in mBio. “Efficient sugar uptake is crucial for microbial cell factories, so sugar transporters are important targets for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology development of industrial microorganisms,” said co-corresponding author Prof. CUI Qiu from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The bacterium, Clostridium thermocellum, has long been a lead contender in the sustainable industrial production of biofuels. Although how the industrial microorganism C. thermocellum uptakes sugars has been of great interest for many years and five potential sugar transporters were discovered in 2009, difficulties with gene manipulation in this bacterium has restricted functional validation.

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2022-09-26

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Mirage News

Engineered living materials promise to aid efforts in human health, energy and environmental remediation. Now they can be built big and customized with less effort. Bioscientists and synthetic biologists at Rice University have introduced centimeter-scale, slime-like colonies of engineered bacteria that self-assemble from the bottom up. It can be programmed to soak up contaminants from the environment or to catalyze biological reactions, among many possible applications. The creation of autonomous engineered living materials — or ELMs — has been a goal of bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin since long before she joined Rice in 2019 with a grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).

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2022-09-22

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EurekAlert

The prospect of creating life in the laboratory is as fascinating as it is terrifying. Will we really be able to modify the genetic code of a living creature to mold it to our design? Will we be able to assemble different bits of living creatures to create a new one?  The game of life A few years back, J. Craig Venter announced the creation of a living, self-reproducing bacterial cell with a DNA sequence produced in the laboratory. According to Laurie Garrett’s 2013 article for Foreign Affairs about this experiment, the creature “moved, ate, breathed, and replicated itself.” Garrett quotes from an older interview with Venter from 2009: “There’s not a single aspect of human life that doesn’t have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future.”

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2022-09-21

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Big Think

BEER SCIENCHops generate both a beer’s taste and its aroma. And now researchers at Oregon State University have found that it’s possible to alter a beer’s aromatics using synthetic biology that doesn’t involve hops. Here’s the deal… Craft beer production in the US has grown exponentially over the last twenty years with hop-forward beer styles, such as India Pale Ales, leading that explosion. Defined their pungent flavors and aromas these IPAs are typically made using large amounts of aromatic hops, with the essential oils in hops being the main contributor to aromas in beers.

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2022-09-21

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American Craft Beer

Perfect Day – which pioneered the production of ‘animal-free’ dairy proteins using microbes instead of cows – has announced a new brand identity for its enterprise biology business, nth Bio, and unveiled its first publicly-announced partner: Finnish startup Onego Bio, which makes egg proteins… without chickens.

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2022-09-20

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Food Navigator

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have taken a major step forward in synthetic biology by designing a system that performs several key functions of a living cell, including generating energy and expressing genes. Their artificially constructed cell even transformed from a sphere shape to a more natural amoeba-like shape over the first 48 hours of 'life', indicating that the proto-cytoskeletal filaments were working (or, as the researchers put it, were "structurally dynamic over extended time scales"). Building something that comes close to what we might think of as alive is no walk in the park, not least thanks to the fact even the simplest of organisms rely on countless biochemical operations involving mind-bendingly complex machinery to grow and replicate.

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2022-09-19

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Sciencealert

Just as balsamic vinegar and olive oil when sloshed together separate into distinct phases, phase separation of viscous droplets in the crowded belly of the cell can concentrate certain biomolecules and accelerate biochemical reactions. Yet, the importance of such liquid phase separations (technically called, condensates) in biologically relevant phenomena such as fluctuations in molecular signaling have been difficult to pin down.

“People generally try to assess the importance of these droplets by chopping or changing molecules that are integral to their formation. They see, when droplets fall apart the cell is broken, and they conclude condensates are important,” said Liam Holt, PhD, an associate professor in the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health. “But there are two reasons why the cell might have broken—either the viscous droplets or the molecule that was changed or chopped, is crucial for the cell.”

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2022-09-19

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GEN

The threat from biological weapons use by nations or terrorists is entering an era of potentially heightened risk, but the dimensions of the danger are not yet clear, a panel of experts said Friday. The event took place at Rand Corp., and involved two top House Intelligence Committee Republicans from Ohio and a panel of half a dozen experts. Rep. Michael R. Turner, the committee’s ranking member, described Friday’s event as part of the committee’s effort to engage academia and think tanks. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, a surgeon and an Army reservist, moderated the panel. Calibrating risk The panel sorted through conflicting impressions of the threat. It some ways, it has yet to manifest itself. Yet advances in technology appear to make biological weapons manufacturing know-how more widely accessible and the lethality of such agents potentially greater.

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2022-09-19

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Roll Call

In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted the rise of animal-free food. Then an opposition MP in his wilderness years, Churchill wrote an essay that imagined life in 50 years’ time. “Synthetic food will, of course, be used in the future,” he wrote. The artificial stuff would “be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation,” Churchill wrote. “Microbes, which at present convert the nitrogen of the air into proteins by which animals live, will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions just as yeast is now.” Though several decades later than envisaged, Churchill’s prediction has been borne out by the development of lab-grown meat and, more recently, animal-free dairy products.

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2022-09-17

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The Guardian