Tag: Synthetic Biology

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…

Cannabis sativa L. produces cannabinoid compounds that interest the medical community for the treatment of symptoms that may be difficult to suppress with common medical treatments. Research on cannabinoids is limited by their low abundance in plant tissue and structurally complex chemical synthesis.…

Steve Jacobsen’s group has been developing a broad range of synthetic biology tools to interrogate DNA-methylation in plants (see Gallego-Bartolomé et al., 2018, and Gallego-Bartolomé et al., 2019). Among them, they use the CRISPR-Cas9 SunTag system, in which the dCas9 protein is fused to SunTag,…

In part III of the blog series looking at future directions in Plant Synthetic Biology, I caught up with members of the Earlham DNA Foundry to find out about how anyone in research might benefit from a Foundry as well as careers in managing facilities and requirements for wet-lab positions. A…

This post is part of a series looking at careers in Plant Synthetic Biology leading up to the 1st ASPB Plant SynBio meeting on the 7-9 Aug 2019, in San Jose CA. Follow the PlantSynbio2019 Twitter account for updates about the event. Looking back 200 years in time to the Northwest…

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…

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…

I feel guilty about using plastics but it’s hard to break free; they are so integral to a modern lifestyle. However, the problem of plastic pollution is frightening. About 80% of manufactured plastic ends up in landfills or the natural environment. It's appalling to learn that the "Great Pacific Garbage…