Funding guidelines
The mission of the SynBERC SLC is to enrich the student and postdoc experience within SynBERC while providing a student voice to the NSF and faculty on the functioning of the Center. Through the SLC Service Grant Program, we aim to promote and fund student-initiated and student-run projects that further these goals.

What kind of projects are you looking for? How do you decide what to fund?

A team of researchers from SynBERC, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and biotech firm LS9 has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

Graduate students Jeffrey Dietrich, Howard Chou, and Eric Steen from the Keasling lab, as well as Angela Won from the Lim lab, participated in the 2009 Idea to IPO class offered by the Center for BioEntrepreneurship at the University of California San Francisco.

Work is beginning on an industry-inspired testbed that aims to construct an advanced fermentation organism. Led by Chris Voigt, the new testbed aims to apply research from the SynBERC thrusts (parts, devices, chassis) to the construction of a “smart” strain that can be programmed to sense and respond to conditions encountered during a fermentation. The focus will be on the construction of a generic system that is applicable to many potential pathways. E. coli has been chosen as the model system because of the availability of platform parts/devices and genome replacement tools.

Ars Synthetica, led by Paul Rabinow, has received an NSF informal science communication grant for $75,000 to develop multiple means for exploring bioethics, biosecurity, and how cutting-edge bioscience is organized, governed, and funded. Ars Synthetica is a web-based multimedia forum for engaging specialists and non-specialists in an informed, ethical, and democratic dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE), the Church lab’s new cell programming method that promises to give biotechnology – in particular synthetic biology – a powerful boost, made its public debut in the July issue of Nature.

More that 800 students participated in this year's International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition at MIT this year. Throughout the history of the iGEM competition, projects have been exclusively conceived, designed, and executed by the students.  As the competition has grown the success of the student projects has increased dramatically as has the intensity with which students devote themselves to their projects.

The goal of our research program is to develop the foundational understanding and technologies that will allow us to routinely build large numbers of useful biological systems from standard interchangeable parts. Our specific aims are: