With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SynBERC bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

SynBERC investigator Chris Voigt and a group of graduate students from his lab took a leap forward in the pursuit of chemicals derived not from petroleum but from renewable sources. The chemical target was methyl halides, a chemical precursor to several high-value chemicals, and which the oil industry already knows how to derive gasoline from.

This is a test of the SynBERC related nodes system.

A Nature review article by Priscilla Purnick and new SynBERC investigator Ron Weiss offers a peek at how synbio research might shape up. The authors assert that, until now, the field has focused on the non-trivial challenge of combining basic elements (promoters, RBSs, repressors, etc.) into functional and robust modules (switches, pulse generators, cascades, etc.). These efforts have allowed control over the “central dogma” of cellular function (transcription, translation, and post-translational control).

Two meetings in the Bay Area have taken a fresh look at the role of computerized automation in the design of biological systems. The first meeting, which took place on July 26 at Stanford and was sponsored by the BioBricks Foundation, was intended to further develop a data and information exchange standard(s) supporting synthetic biology.

SynBERC’s Program Director, Sohi Rastegar, appeared on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on a segment focused on synthetic biology. Dr. Rastegar explained the nature of synthetic biology, especially in comparison to natural biology, and talked about SynBERC’s flagship role in NSF’s effort to advance synthetic biology. A short but frank and civil discussion took place regarding the security and safety issues that novel biological systems pose. Appearing with Dr.

July 26, 2009: Synthetic biology portends big changes in our lives by ushering in a dizzying array of applications in everything from medicine to biofuels, environmental remediation to agriculture. Though many of these applications haven’t yet come on line, researchers are hard at work to synthesize new drugs and devices made from genetic parts.

SynBERC Investigators Drew Endy and Paul Rabinow were featured speakers at a recent Washington, D.C. meeting on Opportunities and Challenges in the Emerging Field of Synthetic Biology, co-hosted by the National Academies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Royal Society. Presentations, audio and transcripts from the meeting are available on the National Academies website.

On the path toward sophisticated cellular computation, synthetic biologists are constantly seeking better ways to program logic into cells. One way to do this is using DNA segments known as inversion recombination elements. In essence, these inversion elements act like binary switches that can write ones and zeroes directly into DNA. In the July 30, 2008, issue of PLOS, SynBERC researchers Timothy Ham, Sung Kuk Lee, Jay Keasling and Adam Arkin demonstrate how engineers can combine two or more such elements together to design complex logical systems in DNA.