The 4th Domain

Cas9 – could it change Biotech forever? Well, you’ll have to follow that link to find out. In the meantime, here’s a very brief introduction. CRISPR – clustered, regularly interspersed, short palindromic repeats – are used by bacteria and archaea to provide protection against foreign nucleic acid sequences.

Any would-be Exeter iGEMers may be interested in this article, appearing in Nature, about the current state of play in biocomputing: i.e. using biological molecules to perform computation. The article introduces the work presented in the paper, “Synthetic circuits integrating logic and memory in living cells”

PLOS One has launched the Synthetic Biology Collection, a collection of over 50 papers published in the last six years (all open access, of course): This collection aims to highlight PLOS ONE’s role in the emerging interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology. The collection has its roots in PLOS ONE’s very first issue, which included two publications [...]

The iGEM team from Harvard 2010, and their iGarden have found their way to publication in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Their new paper, “A BioBrick compatible strategy for genetic modification of plants“

There’s a lot of interest (including at the Beeb) in a new paper from Drew Endy published in PNAS: rewritable digital data storage in live cells via engineered control of recombination directionality.

The 4th Domain will be a little quiet over the next few months, mainly due to the upcoming iGEM competition.   Follow the link to see how we are doing. In the meantime there are two papers I would like to draw your attention to.