Dr. Adam Arkin Professor, Bioengineering; Faculty Scientist, Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Director, The Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Core Member, UCB/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering; Director Bioinformatics Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) Will talk on Synthetic Biology.

Title: Towards Scalable Synthetic Biology for Engineering Beyond the Bioreactor

Abstract:
Our current ability to engineer biological circuits is hindered by design cycles that
are costly in terms of time and money, with constructs failing to operate as desired, or
evolving away from the desired function once deployed. Synthetic biologists seek to
understand biological design principles and use them to create technologies that increase
the efficiency of the genetic engineering design cycle. Central to the approach is the
creation of biological parts — encapsulated functions that can be composited together
to create new pathways with predictable behaviors. We have defined five desirable
characteristics of biological parts — independence, reliability, tunability, orthogonality
and composability. We demonstrate these concepts with examples of controllers of
gene expression that exercise these properties and point to how the engineering goals of
synthetic biology can be met.

We suggest that the creation of appropriate sets of families of parts with these properties
is a prerequisite for efficient, predictable engineering of new function in cells and will
enable a large increase in the sophistication of genetic engineering applications. We
further argue that the true power of such a framework is only realized when engineering
the complex behaviors of cells, such as required for operation beyond the bioreactor and
biosynthetic operations. We describe our efforts in such engineering viruses and bacteria
for HIV and cancer therapies respectively.

The meeting will be on the Berkeley campus at Stanley Hall 106

The Bay Area Bioinformatics Forum will be on hiatus during the month of August.

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