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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
Category: bacteria
In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:27 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
Biosafety has been on everyone's mind this week after the announcement of the J. Craig Venter Institute's successful transplantation of a synthetic genome. What horrible pathogen will future bioengineers be able to design? What unforeseeable environmental catastrophe will befall us...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:52 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: plants
What is a true food allergy, and what can be done to fix them besides banning peanuts from schools and avoiding foods that make us itchy?
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: synthetic biology
The reaction to the Venter Institute's synthetic genome transplantation has been decidedly mixed. Is this the beginning of something new and wonderful, the ability to really design organisms from scratch? Is it something more sinister, the beginning of a dark...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:10 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: bioethics
Unlike many of my colleagues, I'm not really interested in the whole "science vs. religion" thing, but I do want to point out the very thoughtful analysis of genetic engineering and synthetic biology by the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion,...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:47 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: movies
My semester in MIT's course on Documenting Science Through Video and New Media has drawn to a close. I've had a wonderful time and learned a lot about how films and science are constructed by different people in different times...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:58 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
An interesting paper in BioEssays last month looks at the potential future of xenobiology, totally orthologous biological systems made out of synthetic nucleotide and amino acid bases, new cells that use XNA instead of DNA. The author, Markus Schmidt, argues...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:10 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
The fight over genetically modified foods, whether they're safe, healthy, good for the environment, or just plain "unnatural," has been going on for a long time now. Most people in the scientific community agree that genetic modification in general is...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:50 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
Some of the responses to my post about synthetically expanding the genetic code have highlighted some of the weaknesses in my argument about the safety of using a different genetic code. Namely, that "life finds a way", that we can't...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:40 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: synthetic biology
Almost every living thing shares an identical genetic code, with three nucleic acids in an RNA sequence coding for a single amino acid in the translated protein sequence. While there are 64 three-letter RNA sequences, there are only 20 amino...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 7:10 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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