The 4th Domain

We’ve just published a JoVE protocol showing how to use perfluorodecalin to image plant leaves at depth. This is a simple video which summarises the technique used in our 2010 paper on infiltrative imaging.

Update: In what will probably be typical for this blog, shortly after posting an article on 3D bone printing from TU Munich 2011, further information came to light. Here is some more on 3D tissue printing that may be of interest from Lawrence Bonassar at Cornell

In the first post of this series I looked at the last three winners of the iGEM Grand Prize: University of Washington, Team Slovenia and the University of Cambridge. In the second post I shall cover three imaginative iGEM projects which set out to produce useful materials in novel ways; namely Blood, Bone, and Concrete.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has a new video on YouTube discussing the role of design in synthetic biology. In it she discusses E. chromi, the synthetic aesthetics group and body cheese in Berlin.

This is another quick post to draw attention to a new paper in Science. There is a précis in Nature Reviews Genetics to get you started: Synthetic biology: Simplifying design. An advance is presented in a paper that demonstrates a computer-aided approach for designing RNA-based devices with predictable functional properties in Escherichia coli.

This paper from Patrick Boyle and Pam Silver at Harvard/the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering (and who wouldn’t want to work there!) gives a nice comparison of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.  If you thought it was all a cut-and-paste process with a large element of luck, then think again.