The 4th Domain

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”

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.

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.

Here’s a typically scary interesting story from the Daily Mail. The article asks: could synthetic biology lead to mind hackers? (Whilst I was surprised that the Mail was aware of synthetic biology, I was even more surprised that there was no mention of whether or not synthetic biology causes or cures cancer).