Just a quick note to say that Alla Katsnelson of The Scientist has a couple of articles on recent efforts to develop technical standards in synthetic biology. The first describes the iGEM competition and its success as serving as a both a recruiting tool and testbed for engineering multi-component biological systems. It also describes some [...]

My good friend Natalie Kuldell and I had the pleasure of participating at a recent Soapbox session hosted by the MIT Museum on DIY biology.  (Though frankly, I prefer the term DIY bioengineering, because I think hobbyists are going to be a lot more excited by what they can build than by what they can [...]

We are looking forward to an exciting and busy year for Ginkgo and we wish you the same. The Ginkgo team is speaking at a number of events in the coming months – keep an eye on our news page for more details. We are also delighted to announce the first annual recipient of the [...]

Can’t keep a ginkgo tree down, apparently. On a completely unrelated note, if you use restriction enzymes as much as we do this recent paper in NAR we came across will be pretty useful to you – The Fidelity Index provides a systematic quantitation of star activity of DNA restriction endonucleases (Wei et al, from [...]

Carl Zimmer on his Discover Magazine blog predicts that Obama’s choice of Steve Chu as Energy Secretary will be a boon for synthetic biology.  We hope so! Here’s a link to a video of Steve’s talk at the Synthetic Biology 2.0 conference at Berkeley in 2006 (RealPlayer needed, unfortunately).  You can find the videos from the other [...]

The always interesting Seed Magazine reports on the work of Mac Cowell and DIYBio to bring biology to the masses. In a long interview, Mac lays out his vision of how amateurs can contribute to biological research in a similar manner to how amateur computer scientists were, and continue to be, so influential in (silicon-based) [...]

Well, time for me to make an appearance on the blog.  Now that Barry has added authorship, my delinquence has become obvious.  Just wanted to flag a New York Times article about bringing back Mammoths.  One of my favorite synthetic biologists – George Church has some interesting comments in the article.  On a side note, I recommend [...]

An exposé of the discrimination and prejudice rampant in tomato society. (Photo originally uploaded by leungski)

Quick update. Last night the judges whittled down the teams to six finalists. They are all presenting once more this morning before the grand prize winner is awarded. The finalists are – Berkeley, Caltech, Slovenia, NYMU Taipei, Freiburg, and Harvard. Berkeley just did a great job and Caltech is up next… Stay tuned.

To cap an exceptional week (Gobama!), over 1000 students, advisors, and other interested parties are arriving at MIT for the annual iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competition this weekend. Over eighty teams will be presenting the results of the projects they have been working on feverishly all summer (and right up until late last night [...]