The DSM Biotechnology Center (DBC) is a leading biotechnology campus located in the ancient city of Delft, The Netherlands, with over 400 employees who are committed to world class research for a broad range of business areas like pharma, food and industrial biotechnology.

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.

This ten week summer research program provides students with basic training in lab fundamentals, exposes them to core concepts of synthetic biology, and engages them in mentored research in the collaborative environments of individual faculty labs. Participants spend the first week in a Lab Fundamentals course that covers basic lab and research skills, and the following nine weeks in mentored research at either UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, or MIT. Each student is matched with an independent research project in a faculty lab.

SynBERC, Life Technologies and other SynBERC Industrial Partners have tentatively planned a workshop on Yeast Synthetic Biology Tools. The workshop, tentatively scheduled for November 14 at UCSF’s Mission Bay Campus, arose from conversations among several SynBERC and IAB members over the past several months around a common interest in yeast synthetic biology tools development and application.

Members of SynBERC’s Student Leadership Council (SLC) visited Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) on Monday, April 20 to host a summit on synthetic biology. The meeting was designed to spark interest among PVAMU students and faculty, as well as highlight the synbio research activities already going on in the Cuero Lab.

SynBERC aims to educate a new cadre of synthetic biologists at the post-doctoral, Ph.D., and B.S. level. SynBERC investigators at both the East Coast and West Coast hubs have developed upper division undergraduate and lower-division graduate level courses that are now being taught.

UC AGEP - Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate

SynBERC, in partnership with the Joint BioEnergy Institute, was honored to host Dr. Sydney Brenner for a special lunchtime seminar and discussion on the role of synthetic biology in bioenergy production, biosynthetic therapeutics, and other areas of social importance. Dr. Brenner has long been at the leading edge of molecular biology: Among his many notable discoveries are the existence of messenger RNA and the triplet nature of the code of protein translation.

SynBERC students from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley were among the finalists in this year's International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition, sponsored by SynBERC and hosted at MIT. Of the 57 teams from universities around the world, UCSF and UCB were selected as two of only 6 finalists.

On August 7, 2007, SynBERC hosted a delegation of twelve university and industry leaders from Colombia to explore how synthetic biology can be used to help Colombian industries, and how our educational resources can be used to develop graduate and undergraduate curricula in the emerging field of synthetic biology for all of Latin America.