Entries by Steven Burgess

Interviews with synthetic biologists: Professor Jennifer Nemhauser

Synthetic biology is a set of tools, a way of thinking, the integration of engineering principles into biological sciences, and potentially the biggest opportunity for advances in plant sciences since PCR. Yet many struggle to define it, and fewer still grasp its full potential. In the first of the series Interviews with Synthetic Biologists, Steven […]

Careers in Plant Synthetic Biology Part II: Computational Synthetic Biology

In part II of the series looking at careers in Plant Synthetic Biology I reached out to Valentin Zulkower who works as the Software Manager of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry (EGF), Scotland, UK, to find out about computational jobs. In what ways can computational biologists contribute to synthetic biology? As a foundry we work on a particular aspect of that question: […]

Synthetic Biology: Improving Photosynthesis

Evidence suggests that crop breeding programs have not optimized photosynthesis making it an attractive target for improvement. The last few years have been an exciting time for photosynthesis research with several groundbreaking studies that have afforded huge advances in both our understanding of the process and ability to engineer improvements. As we learn more about how […]