Researchers have used gene editing to completely eliminate populations of mosquitoes in the lab.
The team tested their technique on the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, which transmits malaria.
They altered part of a gene called doublesex, which determines whether an individual mosquito develops as a male or as a female.
Only time will tell what new forms life will take.
Joyce seeks to understand life by trying to generate simple living systems in the lab. In doing so, he and other synthetic biologists bring new kinds of life into being. Every attempt to synthesize novel life forms points to the fact that there are still more, perhaps infinite, possibilities for how life could be. Synthetic biologists could change the way life evolves, or its capacity to evolve at all. Their work raises new questions about a definition of life based on evolution. How to categorize life that is redesigned, the product of a break in the chain of evolutionary descent?
An origin story for synthetic biology goes like this: in 1997, Drew Endy, one of the founders of synthetic biology and now a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in California, was trying to create a computational model of the simplest life form he could find: the bacteriophage T7, a virus that infects E coli bacteria. A crystalline head atop spindly legs, it looks like a landing capsule touching down on the Moon as it grabs onto its bacterial host. The bacteriophage is so simple that by some definitions it is not even alive. (Like all viruses, it depends on the molecular machinery of its host cell to replicate.) Bacteriophage T7 has only 56 genes, and Endy thought it might be possible to create a model that accounted for every part of the phage and how those parts worked together: a perfect representation that would predict how the phage would change if any one of its genes were moved or deleted.
Continue reading “If We Made Life in a Lab, Would We Understand It Differently?” »
Data centers are the new oil refineries, argues The Economist. Where black sludge and steam once marked the beating heart of the economy, now blinking servers laced with fiber optic cables indicate where the action is.
Biotechnology — like all other industries — must adapt. Synthetic biology teams that embrace modern tools like cloud computing, professionally built software, and laboratory automation will save time, reduce errors, streamline complex workflows, and maintain their agility in the digital economy. Those who fail to adopt new tools will be primed for disruption.
Software is already an integral part of biological research, but most scientific apps lag far behind the rest of the digital frontier. As the software giant Autodesk puts it:
A new potential method to administer gene therapy without triggering an immune response.
Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine managed to administer effective gene therapy in mice without triggering an autoimmune reaction. The research, led by Dr. Peggy Ho, Ph.D., was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1].
Study abstract
Continue reading “Administering Gene Therapy Without Triggering Immune Response” »
“Lego block” artificial cells that can kill bacteria have been created by researchers at the University of California, Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. The work is reported Aug. 29 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
“We engineered artificial cells from the bottom-up – like Lego blocks – to destroy bacteria,” said Assistant Professor Cheemeng Tan, who led the work. The cells are built from liposomes, or bubbles with a cell-like lipid membrane, and purified cellular components including proteins, DNA and metabolites.
“We demonstrated that artificial cells can sense, react and interact with bacteria, as well as function as systems that both detect and kill bacteria with little dependence on their environment,” Tan said.
Continue reading “Artificial cells are tiny bacteria fighters” »
