The 4th Domain

Here is a detour. In this instance a trip into plant metabolism in order to mark the online publication of our latest paper in New Phytologist earlier this month. Whilst there isn’t any synthetic biology here there is biology, and an illustration of how genetics and the environment combine to influence plant behaviour.

For all of you who are interested in science and its place in the intellectual, ethical, practical and economic life of the nation, here is this year’s BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture. Sir Paul Nurse gives a passionate and galvanising view of scientific practice and its consequences in the 2012 lecture. Not strictly synthetic biology, but essential watching!

Horizontal gene transfer is a process where useful genes are transferred between species. It is common in prokaryotes, but here’s a more rare example of the phenomenon across 2 kingdoms of life. A natural version of synthetic biology. Read all about it here and here.

Here’s a documentary and introduction to synthetic biology and the iGEM competition. The film follows the ParaSight iGEM project from Imperial College London 2010.

This Friday (2nd March) Professor Julyan Cartwright (Universidad de Granada) will be giving the following seminar: “Self-organization and self-assembly in biological materials: the example of nacre.” The seminar will be held from 10:00 – 11:00 in Newman D.

There’s a new report in Science, “a logic-gated nanorobot for targeted transport of molecular payloads” from Shawn Douglas, Ido Bachelet and George Church with plenty of coverage, including Nature, New Scientist and SynBio champion the Daily Mail. There is also an accompanying video (below).