Capra Biosciences harnesses the superpowers of a biofilm-forming organism Marinobacter atlanticus to make fat-soluble products like retinol which is used in anti-aging face creams, and high-end industrial lubricants for electric car engines

Some startups, like MicroByre, have been working to domesticate those reluctant, recalcitrant, and rebellious microbes by adapting them for use in the lab and creating genetic tools to manipulate them

Typically, double terminators are used to stop transcription. Because these parts can be up to ∼168 bp of DNA, this use of double terminators can lead to homologous recombination when used at multiple locations in a design

A spacer could compensate for any steric hindrance effect on recruiting the transcriptional machinery at the promoter of the next module in the assembly line; such an effect could be induced by the supercoiling that results when the transcription of the previous module is taking place. However, there is no direct evidence that this may cause a problem, and therefore the argument in favor of using a spacer remains speculative.

More broadly, we hope that others, especially the hundreds of new startups in synthetic biology, consider sharing pre-competitive ideas, methods, tools, etc. We think the community will be stronger as a result.

we usually need 400-1200 colonies, it’s still easier and faster to do this manually than by colony picker. Also, colony pickers typically cost >$100K and don’t seem appropriate for our scale. 

Chemical inducers such as carbon sources, metabolites, and antibiotics, environmental signals such as light, pH, oxygen, or temperature, and autoregulatory quorum-sensing molecules can all be sensed by TFs

This cell is the simplest photosynthetic “machine” designed by nature – an attractive foundation for manipulation

key challenge is to quantify the functional roles of bacterial taxa in nature to understand how the properties of ecosystems change over time or under different environmental conditions

tools described here can be used to mimic complex expression patterns, such as the ones found for pneumococcal virulence factors, paving the way for in vivo investigations of the importance of gene expression control on the pathogenicity of S. pneumoniae.

It is challenging to study how pneumococci control virulence factor expression, because cues of natural environments and the presence of an immune system are difficult to simulate in vitro

includes creation of innovative solutions for bio energy, resource recovery, and emerging public health concerns by leveraging synthetic or molecular biology tools, novel biological systems (genetic circuits, enzymes, genetically engineered microbes), fundamental biological and chemical concepts, artificial intelligence, and big data science, as well as collaborations in Computer Science, Public Health, Plant Biology, or related fields.

CustoMem in the UK uses synthetic biology to create a granular material that attracts and sticks to micropollutants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and certain chemicals in wastewater

MicroBio Engineering Inc., a research and engineering consulting firm specializing in developing improved algal strains and cultivation processes for wastewater reclamation, animal feeds, higher value products and, yes, biofuels.

In Japan, scientists are developing synthetically altered soy plants and yeast that produce glycyrrhizen, a compound in licorice root that is 150 to 300 times sweeter than sugar

approaches have proven invaluable for understanding metabo-lism and improving metabolite production (Wiechert 2002;Patilet al. 2004), metabolic engineering ‘design principles’ are yet tobe fully elucidated due to our incomplete knowledge of livingsystems. Subsequently, it can take many iterations of the classi-cal design-build-test cycle to achieve engineering objectives,some of which may even be impossible to meet using availablebiological knowledge.An elegant way to overcome the challenges associated withengineering in biology is to apply a selective pressure to a genet-ically diverse population so that cells with the desired pheno-type can be isolated.