Recently in Pointers Category

Bio-design automation and synbio tools - The Design Automation Conference (DAC), held recently in San Francisco, concentrates on electrical engineering. But there are a lot of parallels between electrical design and the current state of synthetic-biology design. Melanie Swan reports on the design-automation tools that appeared at the First Workshop on Bio-Design Automation that was held on the first day at DAC.

I missed this in June when it first turned up but you can browse BioBrick parts on your iPhone with software from OpenWetWare. It's in the App Store here.

The New York Times reports that Exxon and J Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics are to work on biofuel-producing algae - presumably using some of the genetic components that Venter's researchers have been capturing from a wide variety of organisms on their bulk genome-sampling missions.

Lloyd's has taken a look at synthetic biology and decided insurers need to wise up over "systemic risks". According to Insurance Daily, the report says: "The enormity of some adverse scenarios suggests the inclusion of various forms of sub-limit in the future."

The Lloyd's report itself is available alongside the news release.

Nature blogs on concerns over the public acceptance of synthetic biology at the recent Washington DC conference organised by the OECD. And whether the technology needs a new name, like "shiny, happy biology". The blog post doesn't mention it but Drew Endy was referring to a joke made at the SB 2.0 conference in 2006 over whether "synthetic biology" was the right name.

Local news for Bostonians on an MIT competition for clean energy. Cambridge, MA-based InAct Labs, which is working on microbial fuel cells, is one of the semi-finalists.

Lingchong You and colleagues at Duke University claim that, although there are many variants of quorum sensing in bacteria, there seems to be one constant: the total volume of bacteria in relation to the volume of their environment is a key to quorum sensing, no matter what kind of microbe is involved.

"If there are only a few cells in an area, nothing will happen," said Anand Pai, who has worked with You on the project. "If there are a lot of cells, the secreted chemicals are high in concentration, causing the cells to perform a specific action. We wanted to find out how these cells know when they have reached a quorum."

The researchers write about the project in the July 2009 issue of Molecular Systems Biology.

Squid's sucker rings point to synthetic biomaterials

"The sucker rings have long been assumed to be made of the sugar-based polymer chitin that comprises the beak of the Humboldt squid and is a common structural material in invertebrates such as arthropods and other mollusks. It was therefore surprising that the researchers could not find any trace of chitin..." - they seem to be made from a protein complex.

Standards and BioBricks

The Scientist looks at the iGEM competition and standards work in the BioBricks Foundation for synthetic biology.

Two scientists talk (briefly) about their systems biology careers

Short profiles and interviews with Malcolm Young, e-Therapeutics, and Hiroaki Kitano, SBI, in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.