The 4th Domain

Many thanks to the University of Exeter’s Annual Fund for providing finance for travel and accommodation for the students to the iGEM European Jamboree this Autumn.

I’m not sure if this has been circulated previously, but a biotech/synbio conference organised by students & post-docs at Cambridge Uni is open for registration…see info here.

There have been a number of interesting stories recently that I have been meaning to write about, but time has got the better of me. There is a growing list of ‘draft’ posts at The 4th Domain, so I thought I would roll them all into one post

Here is an article from Integrated DNA Technologies that is well worth a read. IDT sponsored 11 teams in the 2011 iGEM competition.

A very short post to say that there is a new paper in PNAS that some might find interesting: Genetic switchboard for synthetic biology applications.

One of the advantages of working with bacteria is that genes can be clustered together under control of a single promoter (known as an operon). Multiple protein products can therefore be generated from a single messenger RNA strand (the mRNA is said to be polycistronic (Fig. 1)).