Scientists Planning to Create Synthetic Human Genome

Three weeks ago, 130 scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders held an invitation-only, closed-door meeting at Harvard University to discuss an ambitious plan to create synthetic human genomes. Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they're launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes -- a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.

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Replicants Rising: the Meeting to Discuss Creating a Synthetic Human Genome Held

Earlier this week, over a hundred scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss the radical possibility of creating a synthetic human genome. Strangely, journalists were not invited, and attendees were told to keep a tight lip. Which, given the weighty subject matter, is obvious cause for concern.

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Let There Be Life: The Stakes Raised in Race to Create, Harness Synthetic Life

Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism. Functioning with 473 genes, the cell is a milestone in his team’s 20-year quest to reduce life to its bare essentials and, by extension, to design life from scratch.

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How Genetic Engineering Will Help Astronauts Going to Mars

Don’t panic, future astronauts, but GMOs will probably accompany you on your adventures to deep space.

Scientists hope to genetically engineer organisms to survive off-Earth and to do some of the dirty work on spaceships and other planets. The field of study is called “space synthetic biology.” And this new frontier in genetic research could be key to opening up the final frontier.

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Synthetic Biology Faces Difficult Regulatory Environment for Startups

The pathway to market for new products utilizing synthetic biology can be difficult to navigate, posing a challenge for companies in their efforts to commercialize new ideas, while the novelty posed by some of these products can make it difficult for regulatory agencies to evaluate risks, according to a new report from the Synthetic Biology Project.

The report, The DNA of the U.S. Regulatory System: Are We Getting It Right for Synthetic Biology?, explores current government oversight of synthetic biology in the United States by examining the regulatory pathways of different products and applications. The case studies in the report include synthetic organisms, synthetic chemicals, biopesticides, biomining products, and genetically modified plants, which are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This regulatory environment can be particularly challenging for startups in the biotechnology space. While larger companies may have the resources to navigate the various laws, it can be difficult for smaller companies to know which agency to approach and even which laws may apply to particular applications.

"Based on this report, it appears the U.S. regulatory system may need its own genetic engineering," says Dr. Todd Kuiken, senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project. "The system is not flexible enough to address rapidly evolving technologies like synthetic biology. This could make it difficult for agencies to properly evaluate the potential risks of these products, as well making it difficult for products to move to the market."

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Engineering Synthetic Chromophores to Improve Photosynthesis Through Using "Quantum Goldilocks Effect"

Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed -- a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells.

One way plants achieve this efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics -- effects sometimes known as "quantum weirdness." These effects, which include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system.

Surprisingly, the MIT researchers achieved this new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips -- but by using genetically engineered viruses.

This achievement in coupling quantum research and genetic manipulation, described this week in the journal Nature Materials, was the work of MIT professors Angela Belcher, an expert on engineering viruses to carry out energy-related tasks, and Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum theory and its potential applications; research associate Heechul Park; and 14 collaborators at MIT and in Italy.

Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering, explains that in photosynthesis, a photon hits a receptor called a chromophore, which in turn produces an exciton -- a quantum particle of energy. This exciton jumps from one chromophore to another until it reaches a reaction center, where that energy is harnessed to build the molecules that support life.

But the hopping pathway is random and inefficient unless it takes advantage of quantum effects that allow it, in effect, to take multiple pathways at once and select the best ones, behaving more like a wave than a particle.

This efficient movement of excitons has one key requirement: The chromophores have to be arranged just right, with exactly the right amount of space between them. This, Lloyd explains, is known as the "Quantum Goldilocks Effect."

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The Clinical use of Synthetic Biology

Engineered systems of genes and other molecular components created through synthetic biology make medical treatments more effective and promise cures for a range of health problems. Perhaps equally important, recent technologies make it easier for a broader range of scientists to apply synthetic-biology approaches that drive expanding clinical applications, from designing new diagnostics and building molecularly engineered tissues to developing new drugs and vaccines.

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Safety Concerns About Synthetic Biology Leaving the Lab

Targeted cancer treatments, toxicity sensors and living factories: synthetic biology has the potential to revolutionize science and medicine. But before the technology is ready for real-world applications, more attention needs to be paid to its safety and stability, say experts in a review article published in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology.

Synthetic biology involves engineering microbes like bacteria to program them to behave in certain ways. For example, bacteria can be engineered to glow when they detect certain molecules, and can be turned into tiny factories to produce chemicals.

Synthetic biology has now reached a stage where it's ready to move out of the lab and into the real world, to be used in patients and in the field. According to Professor Pamela Silver, one of the authors of the article from Harvard Medical School in the US, this move means researchers should increase focus on the safety of engineered microbes in biological systems like the human body.

"Historically, molecular biologists engineered microbes as industrial organisms to produce different molecules," said Professor Silver. "The more we discovered about microbes, the easier it was to program them. We've now reached a very exciting phase in synthetic biology where we're ready to apply what we've developed in the real world, and this is where safety is vital."

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Wait! WHAT?!?! DARPA Working on Genetically Engineering Mars Terraforming Organisms?!

It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it's on the way to creating organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.

The goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on.

“For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay,” Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office said Monday at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference. As she said this, Jackson was pointing at an artist's rendering of a terraformed Mars.

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Knowing DARPA, I suspect they are going more for an Scalzi Future rather than terraform Mars.  Then again, maybe DARPA is prepping Mars as the American bolthole in case we lose in a fight with China.  ;)

This Can Only End Well! Release Synthetic Biological Organisms to Fight Climate Change

One way to combat climate change could be to release synthetic organisms that sequestrate carbon. How this can be done safely is a question bioengineers are now beginning to address.

The inexorable rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the steady increase in global temperatures raise the frightening prospect of significant change in Earth’s climate. Indeed, the evidence seems clear that our climate is altering rapidly.

So scientists and politicians the world over are looking for ways to halt or reverse these changes, a task that is fraught with difficulties in a world hooked on fossil fuels. One option increasingly discussed is terraforming—deliberately altering the environment in a way that cools the planet, perhaps by absorbing carbon dioxide or reflecting sunlight

To have an impact, these kinds of plans changes must have a global reach require engineering projects of previously unimaginable scale. That’s set bioengineers thinking that there might be an alternative option.

Instead of creating global engineering projects, why not create life forms that do a similar job instead. The big advantage of this approach is that organisms grow naturally and can spread across huge areas of the planet by the ordinary mechanisms of life. Thus the process of terraforming the landscape would occur with minimal human input. What could possibly go wrong?

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I think I can see how the blight in Interstellar could plausibly be created!  ;)

The Myths and Realities of Synthetic BioWeapons

The dominant narrative permeating scientific and policy discussions on the security threat posed by synthetic biology can be summarized in five ways:

1. Synthetic biology is making it easier for non-experts to manipulate dangerous pathogens and, therefore, making it easier for terrorists to concoct bioweapons.
2. Synthetic biology has led to the growth of a do-it-yourself biology community that could offer dual-use knowledge and equipment to bioterrorists seeking to do harm.
3. DNA synthesis has become cheaper and can be out-sourced, making it easier for terrorists to obtain the basic materials to create biological threat agents.
4. Non-experts could use synthetic biology to design radically new pathogens.
5. Terrorists want to pursue biological weapons for high-consequence, mass- casualty attacks.

This narrative rests on misleading assumptions about both synthetic biology and bioterrorism, and these five myths are challenged by more realistic understandings of the scientific research currently being conducted in both professional and do-it-yourself laboratories, and by an analysis of historical cases of bioterrorism.

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A Step to 'Now We Are the Gods:' Synthetic Biologists on Course for Making Artificial Cells Mobile

Cells are complex objects with a sophisticated metabolic system. Their evolutionary ancestors, the primordial cells, were merely composed of a membrane and a few molecules. These were minimalistic yet perfectly functioning systems.

Thus, "back to the origins of the cell" became the motto of the group of TUM-Prof. Andreas Bausch, who is member of the cluster of excellence "Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM)" and his international partners. Their dream is to create a simple cell model with a specific function using a few basic ingredients. In this sense they are following the principle of synthetic biology in which individual cellular building blocks are assembled to create artificial biological systems with new characteristics.

The vision of the biophysicists was to create a cell-like model with a biomechanical function. It should be able to move and change its shape without external influences. They explain how they achieved this goal in their latest publication in Science.

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The First Synthetic Leaf

The "first man-made biological leaf" could enable humans to colonise space from Dezeen on Vimeo.

hmm.  I wonder how the chloroplasts can be sustained outside the plant cell...

DeExtinction: Efforts at Harvard are Underway to "Bring Back" the Woolly Mammoth

There's a mission to bring back one of history's most famous animals, it's already underway, and it's closer to becoming a reality than even some of the most forward-looking minds think it is.

For all the talk and attention it gets, de-extincting an animal isn't exactly easy—it's difficult to clone cells from an animal that has been dead for thousands of years, tougher to turn it into a viable embryo, and, most importantly, more difficult still to find a closely-related animal that can serve as a surrogate mother to give birth to the cloned animal. There's certainly work still being done in that area, but, increasingly, researchers are working to hybridize existing animals with extinct ones in order to create what Brand calls a "2.0" version of the animal.

That's what Harvard synthetic biologist George Church is doing with woolly mammoths. Using a genome editing technique known as CRISPR, Church is working on inserting three key genes from woolly mammoths into Asian elephant cells, with the hope of eventually creating a hybrid between the two that will ideally be more mammoth-like than elephant-like.

The project and technology has been touched on before, most notably in a lengthy New York Times Magazine article from February, but Church tells me that the team has now successfully migrated the three genes, which gave the woolly mammoth its furry appearance, extra layer of fat, and cold-resistant blood. In theory, given what we know about both the woolly mammoth genome and the Asian elephant genome, the final product will be something that more closely resembles the former than the latter.

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Synthetic Biology on the Cusp of Creating Synthetic Tissues, not Just Cells?

It is a big dream in science: To start from scratch with simple artificial microskopic building blocks and end up with something much more complex: living systemts, novel computers or every-day materials. For decades scientists have pursied the dream of creating artificial building blocks that can self-assemble in large numbers and reassemble to take on new tasks or to remedy defects. Now researchers from University of Southern Denmark have taken a step forward to make this dream come true.

"The potential of such new man-made systems is almost limitless, and many expect these novel materials to become the foundation of future technologies", says Dr. Maik Hadorn from Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zürich, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Southern Denmark (SDU).

Over the last three years he and the colleagues Eva Boenzli, Kristian T. Sørensen and Martin M. Hanczyc from the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) at SDU have worked on the challenges of making primitive building blocks assemble and turn into something functional.

"We used short DNA strands as smart glue to link preliminary stages of artificial cells (called artificial vesicles) to engineer novel tissue-like structures", says Dr. Maik Hadorn.

As part of the EU-sponsored project MATCHIT (MATrix for CHemical Information Technology) Dr. Maik Hadorn and coworkers have earlier showed that short DNA strands can guide the self-assembly process of artificial vesicles; that two types of artificial vesicles can be linked in a way predefined by the person conducting the experiment, and that assembled structures can be reassembled, when triggered externally[1].

In their most recent scientific article[2], published in Langmuir in December 2013, the researchers from SDU, in collaboration with colleagues from Italy and Japan, not only increased the complexity of the self-assembled structures that are now composed of several types of artificial vesicles – they also loaded one vesicle type with a basic cellular machinery derived from bacterial cells. This enabled these vesicles to translate an encapsulated genetic blueprint into a functional protein.

Put together the researchers have managed to engineer controlled assemblies that are visible to the naked eye and that resemble natural tissues in their architecture as well as in their functionalities.

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Synthetic Bio Leaps and Bounds: Artificial Organelles Sweep Up Free Radicals

Researchers at the University of Basel have successfully developed artificial organelles that are able to support the reduction of toxic oxygen compounds. This opens up new ways in the development of novel drugs that can influence pathological states directly inside the cell. The results have been published in the Journal Nano Letters.

Free oxygen radicals are produced either as metabolic byproduct, or through environmental influences such as UV-rays and smog. Is the concentration of free radicals inside the organism elevated to the point where the antioxidant defense mechanism is overwhelmed, the result can be oxidative stress, which is associated with numerous diseases such as cancer of arthritis.

The aggressive molecules are normally controlled by endogenous antioxidants. Within this process, organelles located inside the cell, so-called peroxisomes, play an important part, since they assist in regulating the concentration of free oxygen radicals.

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Using Synthetic Biology to Grow Clothes

All But Done: The Glowing Plant Project

BioHacking...a talk

LBL Researcher Seeks to Make Mitochondria Free!

[Bustamante's] lab has entered the field of synthetic biology and is working towards creating a living organism by furnishing mitochondria with the genes that might make them independent from their host cells. Mitochondria are energy-generating organelles that are found inside the cells of all eukaryotic organisms such as plants, animals, and humans. They are thought to be descendants of a bacterium that was engulfed by another cell at some point during the evolution of life. Since then, mitochondria have lost most of their genes and cannot live independently anymore, but rely on their host cell for survival. Research in the Bustamante lab aims at reintroducing the essential genes into mitochondria that will make them independent once again, to gain a better understanding of the minimal set of genes that constitutes life.

The link is more a profile of Dr Bustamante than about his research.  However, I couldn't resist the idea of Berkeley espousing freedom for mitochondria!  Synthetic Biology Shall Set You Free!!!

ahem.