Today Lauren Andrews from  University of Massachusetts Amherst visited the course. Lauren is a instructor alumni for the course and it was great to have her back! She discussed her amazing work on sequential logic circuits such as SR latches. She also discussed her automated circuit design approach where part/circuit characterization and mathematical models are combined to predict optimal circuit designs (the syn bio dream ..read more

The course welcomed Rebecca Schulman from Johns Hopkins today. Rebecca gave an amazing talk about her research and how she is trying to address the grand challenge of making smart materials that can move and carry payloads. Rebecca is an expert in DNA nanotechnology. Her research has been combining this technology with other materials to create smart materials capable of dynamically changing shape in response to small molecules and nucleic acid inputs ..read more

Huimin Zhao visited the Synthetic Biology course. Huimin shared his amazing work creating an automated robotics pipeline for building and testing DNA constructs called iBioFAB and how this pipeline is both massively increasing throughput and reducing costs! (For those of you interested in biological foundries Huimin and other scientists across the globe have formed a biofoundries alliance). Huimin also talked about his work in engineering Streptomyces for the discovery of natural products through a variety of strategies including strain engineering and bottom-up pathway refactoring. Also firs ..read more

Andy Ellington from UT Austin returned to the Synthetic Biology Course to talk about the relationship between systems and synthetic biology. Andy discussed a range of topics including efforts to  humanize yeast by replacing ‘phenologs‘ to compliment knock-out mutants and uncover functions of unknown genes. Andy also discussed his efforts to expand the genetic code, and how laboratory evolution can be used as a tool for this. Great discussions followed in the evening on a range of topics from space synthetic biology to the origins of life ..read more

The course welcomed Adam Arkin from UC Berkley. Adam gave fascinating insights into the challenges of engineering cells for deployment in complex environments. He started by discussing his previous work in engineering tumor destroying bacteria. Through this example he highlighted the importance of understanding the target environment to define specifications. He then switched to his work understanding sites of environmental contamination, for example, how microbial communities change before and after contamination and how this evolves over time. Great talk and discussion ..read more

The Synthetic Biology course welcomed Ron Weiss from MIT. Ron gave an amazing primer to synthetic biology! He then discussed three very different points of control for biology (transcription, translation and post-translation) and the unique capability of each of these modes. He then shared his groups amazing work on engineering cellular differentiation to create organoids ..read more

Mustafa Khammash from ETH Zurich visited the Synthetic Biology Summer Course. Amazing talk demonstrating the principles of control theory applied to synthetic biology. Presentation included an interactive demonstration of the principles of a proportional–integral–derivative controller (PID controller) using a lego robot. We then heard about brand new work in creating a synthetic controller for biology using the principle of biomolecular sequestration ..read more

Today Francesca Ceroni from Imperial College London presented to the Synthetic Biology Course. Francesca shared her work in understanding the burden of genetic circuits by creating new tools to monitor burden dynamically and to overcome it through implementation of host-circuit feedback. Francesca is a newcomer to the CSHL course and gave a fantastic talk ..read more

Today Karmella Haynes from Emory University visited the Synthetic Biology course to present her work on Synthetic Epigenetics. In her talk she discussed her latest work engineering synthetic transcription factors that utilize chromatin modifications to direct gene regulation. In doing so her lab is creating new tools that can be utilized as therapeutics for the treatment of human diseases such as cancer. Karmella is also one of the founding instructors of the CSHL Synthetic Biology course and it is great to welcome her back ..read more

Today, our sixteen 2018 CSHL Synthetic Biology students gave presentations to wrap up the course. During the second week of the course, they worked in small groups to complete creative projects based on the work from the instructors’ labs and based on the fundamental techniques they learned during week one. Mutating genes in live bacterial cells using EvolvR Mutating genes in live bacterial cells using EvolvR. These projects were related to the exciting new paper just published by Prof. John Dueber’s lab at UC Berkeley  (Halperin et al. 2018 Nature), CRISPR-guided DNA polymerases enable dive ..read more