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.

Just a very quick note to say that Claes Gustafsson, co-founder of synbio company DNA2.0 (far right), will be giving a seminar on gene design and their protein/pathway engineering platform on Wednesday 20th March at 3pm in GP328a.

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”

Any recent graduates or undergraduates in their final year looking for PhD positions in synthetic biology, take note: there are six synthetic biology PhD studentships available at the University of Exeter looking at biomethane-producing microbial communities (BMCs).

As the dust settles on iGEM 2012, I have asked one of the Exeter 2012 team and iGEM blogger for her thoughts on a summer of iGEM.

A new video introduction to synthetic biology and the iGEM competition has made its way online and though it mainly features the NRP-UEA iGEM team, I’m of course pleased to say that the good folks of the Exeter iGEM team have managed to work their way in there too