Continued from yesterday

“I decided to take what we understand in computing and apply that to programming biology. To me, that’s really the essence of synthetic biology.” - Ron Weiss

At 3 am I finished watching Playing God, BBC 2’s Horizon episode on synthetic biology. If you don’t have an hour to spare but you’re still interested in the contents of the video, Andrew Rutherford provides a summary in this article over at The Guardian. It’s all fun and games and then you realize that the field is consistently moving,

Scientists have long since managed to reconstruct the proteins in the silk, using everything from bacteria to potatoes to goats. But these systems only provided small amounts of silk proteins, and would be expensive to scale up. Making silk proteins is just part of the far harder challenge of turning proteins into silk fibres, with their complex microscopic structures. To get around these problems, Donald Jarvis, Malcolm Fraser and Randolph Lewis had a simple idea: why not use another animal that also spins silk?

From Not Exactly Rocket Science [Discovery Blogs]

May. 2 2012
#biology #synthetic biology
3 notes

Notes

  1. thenoobyorker posted this