Rob Carlson’s forthcoming book (<- Amazon link for pre-order), Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life now has a blog with the first chapter posted online! It’s fascinating so far, I’m really looking forward to reading the rest!
Synthetic Biology Project Maps Inventory
The emergence of synthetic biology clusters, where companies are linked by common markets, labor pools, and similar technologies, is currently underway in the United States and Europe. Whether these clusters will gain performance advantages through co-location and have significant impacts on local economies is yet to be determined, but the identification of emerging pockets of activity is an important first step in the development of strategies to improve local innovation and stimulate employment growth.
Great paper from John Dueber in the Keasling lab about using synthetic scaffold proteins to improve the function of an engineered metabolic pathway. Besides the ridiculous improvement in pathway function because of having a perfectly tuned pathway, this is neat because the scaffold proteins come from mammalian cells, but are functional in bacteria where there is nothing that can interact with the scaffold proteins to interfere. There are many possibilities of adapting this kind of scaffold to other projects (including mine!) and of using this kind of thing to better understand how protein interactions work and evolve. Awesome!
