The 4th Domain

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)).