The leafy-green in the coal mine

June Medford PhD has used the techniques of synthetic biology to create a plant that can detect the chemicals present in a bomb. In this interview with PBS Dr. Medford reveals additional potential of this environmental monitor.

Glowing Plant Update

Last week I told you about a new Kickstarter Project that promises seeds for a glowing plant in the mail. As a PostDoc in an Arabidopsis lab, of course I funded it. So watch out, I will be blogging the process of growing these glowing seedlings as soon as the embryos arrive (sometime in 2014).

I was not the only one to show this project love. In three days the project creators reached their goal of $65,000. Now they have 39 days left to let the money keep on rolling in. This Kickstarter is so noteworthy because it appears to be the first serious Synthetic Biology project made possible by crowd-funding. Check out the video to get up to date on the status of the project.

Kickstart a Glowing Plant!

Here's the link to the first synthetic biology Kickstarter Project. Imagine a world where we grow our light-bulbs in pots!

Your Brain in the Cloud

If you think this guy is a joke after watching the above video consider this - Ray Kurzweil is the current director of engineering at Google!

When he speaks of having gateways to the cloud in our brains I can't help think we are already there in many ways.

Let me tell you what I did today and yesterday on my iPhone. Along my daily bike ride into the lab I saw a beautiful flower. I had not seen this flower yet this season and was unaware of its identity. However, I knew that either my mother or my girlfriend or both would know the name of the mysterious purple flower.

With photo-text on my phone and the three characters - ID? - I was able to procure the information I wanted within seconds - common name Periwinkle,  Latin name Vinca minor. While I road my bike past another periwinkle in bloom this morning I again took its photo. This time I was armed with the ID so I posted the photo to twitter and facebook and labeled it with time, date and geo-coordinates. This image has now become a phenological data point in the cloud. I hope it will one day be deposited into a massive data-set and mapped to a model of earth's surface so we can look back at the phenological record as captured by citizen-scientists all over the world. If you are not familiar with the word phenology see my earlier post and video on the topic.

Biomimicy of the lung!

Don Ingber walks us through his synthetic lung. This talk was part of the free event -Radical Innovation- at the 2012 World Science Festival in New York City.

Bernie Rollin ~ our obligation to animals

I am currently writing up a series of interviews I did with Bernard Rollin, PhD. Look for it in the next issue of the Matter Journal. Returned from a book signing he did tonight at the CSU bookstore where he gave an intimate talk on the highlights of his 41 years as a Professor of philosophy at Colorado State University.  He is a University Distinguished Professor and Bio-ethicist in residence.

His autobiography is Putting the Horse before Descartes.

 

Freedom of the Genetic Press? Can newly created letters of life's alphabet be patented?

Life is written in a language of chemical sentences. In 2006 a group of researchers began the process of engineering new letters to be incorporated into genetic alphabet. The naturally occurring genetic alphabet is made up of 20 chemical letters (amino acids). These letters are arranged in the correct order by molecular machines called ribosomes into words that make sense (proteins). There are words of all sizes that perform key functions in all organism, from two letter hormones to the epic 26,000 lettered titan muscle protein. Each of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids is known by the translating machinery to correspond to a sequence of three specific nucleotide bases (codons). Because there are four nucleotide bases and they come together in groups of three (4x4x4 = 64) there are 64 different combinations of these base pairs. Because there are only 20 naturally occurring amino acids and 64 ways to code for them that leaves 44 options left open to code for other things. Nature uses most of these extra codons as redundant codes for the same amino acid so some letters will have 2-6 different codes all calling for the same letter. But there are some of these extra codons that are nonsensical and do nothing apparently useful. What this research group did was take advantage of these extra three letter codons and engineered a special translator molecule known as transfer RNA or tRNA that they attached to new unnatural letters - (man made amino acids).
The mind blowing novelty of this expanded genetic alphabet is only now being realized for practical purposes. With new man made letters within nature's alphabet of life researchers are taking this patented technology and using it to create Frankenstein proteins with diverse and useful features like hemoglobin mimicry and in cell localization. This process will be at the heart of synthetic biology. The question stands... Is a patent for an unnatural letter allowed? Apparently so according to the US government's patent office. But does that mean that I could invent new letters for the English alphabet and patent them to make a profit if others eventually use them?