BioBrick

If you met a person back in the late 1900s and told them that by 2017, computers would automate every part of our lives ranging from shopping, communication, to gaming, they would be in disbelief. The idea that supercomputers would fit in your pockets and you could use them, in Nikola Tesla’s words, “to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance” and “see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles” all

A Biobrick is a specific sequence that is inserted into a plasmid. The Biobrick’s restriction enzymes are standardized and are the same set of restrictions enzymes, so the parts can be easily ligated together. There are 2 conserved elements in promoters -35 and -10 sequence. Bacterial polymerases require a sigma factor to bind to promoter sequence, and variations in these sequences as well as in the spacing between them affect how well the sigma factor binds, leading to different promoter strengths

Regulation of any biological phenotype is a complex and tuned phenomenon (Weng et al, 1999). Biological systems face frequent change in the environment, both at intrinsic and extrinsic levels. These systems have evolved themselves to integrate these fluctuations and take an appropriate decision (Helikar et al, 2008). Classical genetics and DNA sequencing have provided a lot of information about different types of genes and their functions, but how do these genes interact and integrate environmental

or constitutively expressed promoter. Ribosome binding site (RBS) and gfp are present downstream to TBS (Fig. 1). gfp was used as proxy to quantitate the promoter expression. Repressor modules were based on kanamycin resistance medium copy number BioBrick plasmid, pSB3K3 (Shetty et al, 2008). Four different types of repressor modules, PR1T1, PR1T8, PR2T1, and PR2T8, were constructed combinatorially by implementing two types of riboswitches and two types of TALEs (supplementary table 1). Used riboswitches

biological reactions that normally occur. The current ambition is to create a database of shared standardised parts that will be used to manipulate DNA. An example is the BioBricks Foundation which provides open access to DNA sequences for cloning and expression of different nucleic acids and proteins. The information that BioBricks provides, is shared through iGEM the annual international competition to students from across the world who want to do research and give solutions to real world problems

A Global Debate: Can Synthetic Biology help mitigate Biodiversity Loss? Biodiversity loss is pervasive, and conservationists shoulder the responsibilities to halt the decline. Synthetic biologists also want to help, but both sides must first hash out how “engineered” solutions may impact the wild. Read more… In early December 2016, people from nearly every nation flocked to Cancun. This wasn’t a jovial vacation or a holiday break. It was the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) – a meeting