Over many posts now we have discussed the definition and impact of synthetic biology, and also where and how technological surprise in biology might arise. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Opportunities’
On miscegenesis and grappling
Sunday, January 30th, 2011On artificial proteins
Sunday, January 16th, 2011My friend Mike Hecht at Princeton has just published a quite interesting paper in PLoS One (also known as the journal that takes significant findings when no one else will). In this paper (Fisher et al. (2011), 6:e15364) he shows that an expression library of completely random ‘proteins’ of 102 residues in length can suppress a variety of deletion variants that would otherwise inhibit cell growth. Most remarkably, four different deletion variants can be suppressed by the tandem expression of four selected, but otherwise random, proteins. (more…)
On predicting evolution
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010It sucked to be a dog in the late 1970s. It wasn’t just that your owners wanted you to wear cute, doggy-tailored wide-bottomed jeans, it was the fact that your historical enemies, the cats, had unleashed a devastating wave of biological warfare on you. (more…)